Now if only websites will stop rejecting plus-addressed email addresses as invalid. The most frequent offenders are mom & pop websites that you just _know_ are going to get breached.
It reminds me a gag from the last season of What we do in the shadow. A character puts a toothpick on his lip and suddenly none of the other characters recognise him.<p>Like if spammers and hackers were not aware of the + notation, and like if it wasn’t trivial to extract the underlying email address by removing anything after the +...<p>Unless you have an alias that completely obfuscate the underlying email, I just don’t see the point.
I moved all my public emails from first@last.something to first.last@wellknownmailprovider<p>and then spent a lot of time changing my email address in accounts that I've had a really long time.<p>Shocked at how badly that went, actually. For certain service providers, I couldn't change my email address and was encouraged to open a new account, which would've meant losing certain records in the old accounts. I couldn't consolidate.<p>And companies that have different email addresses for their accounts and their mailing lists -- not helpful.<p>And finally, companies that disable the "update your email address" link in footer of popular email list services, so your only option is to unsubscribe -- good going (not).
I understand the appeal of this feature for sorting, but it seems ineffective for things like "figure out who sold my email to the spammers" because everyone knows about it and it's elementary to just trim off everything after the plus sign.<p>Unless you do some kind of verification and filter email sent to addresses without a valid suffix?
The process for sending email /from/ a + address is tricky.<p>First -- in GMail at least -- you have to explicitly set up a + account as being in your list of "from" accounts and then you have to remember to use it every time you reply!<p>Not to mention forgetting the email I gave them when resetting passwords sucks, too. "Was that foo+hn or foo+ycombinator or foo+ycombinator.com or foo+hackernews or... hm... uhhh..." (You need a centralized password manager, in other words.)<p>I've had several issues where I've replied and sending from the base-address means the conversation goes awry ("We don't recognize this email address"), or at best I still expose the base address because I only remember to reply using the laboriously-created-from-plus address about a fourth of the time.
I think if you have the means, you should always get a custom domain for your email address. Your email address is the key to your online identity. You should own it, and not lease it from someone else.<p>And it is not like you have to manage your own email servers. You can use services like fastmail or any number of email providers to receive email on your own domain. You also have the ability to change your implementation without changing your address. You can decide to host it yourself, or go to another provider without having to tell all your contacts that you are changing your email.<p>It becomes trivial to actually give out email addresses that are customized for the service. Instead of me+service@hotmail.com you can give out service@mydomain.com.<p>In my opinion, the money you spend for your own domain for email, is well worth it.
I wonder why there are no email providers that offer an infinite number of aliases that cannot be associated with the primary address. Simply offering any aliases would soon fill out easy-to-remember addresses, but can't email providers offer a feature to add a randomly-generated address such as 098f6bcd4621d373cade4e832627b4f6@email.provider? This way, users can use a different email address on a different web service when registration, which would reveal no information about the user and drastically improve users' privacy. In addition, it is easy to track down which web service is at fault in the event of receiving spams via sold user data.
Maybe they will get around to fixing their In-Reply-To header removal madness one of these decades too, would be something!<p>Tired of Microsoft users subscribed to mailinglists constantly breaking threading.
I found out this was a bad idea to use when I used it with gmail to signup for AirBnB. I had forgotten that I used it.<p>I created a new account without it, but I could not bring over my past reviews.