Gmail has an interesting idea to thwart spammers

re: Gmail has an interesting idea to thwart spammers

adamo — Thu, 22 May 2008 14:29:01 GMT

This is a known hack for those users who use procmail for message filtering. Unfortunately, there is nothing to stop the address sellers from parsing the LHS of the email address and discard everything from the plus sign up to the at sign.

re: Gmail has an interesting idea to thwart spammers

Matthias Leisi — Thu, 22 May 2008 14:59:48 GMT

You are aware that this has been available in Sendmail and Postfix (and most likely other MTAs) since many, many years?

re: Gmail has an interesting idea to thwart spammers

Justin Mason — Thu, 22 May 2008 15:12:19 GMT

yeah, this is an old UNIX trick. works great ;)

re: Gmail has an interesting idea to thwart spammers

Chris — Thu, 22 May 2008 16:45:06 GMT

Old school trick that the spammers are well aware of I'm afraid.

Postfix has had VERP support since version 1.1 and the recipiennt_delimiter configuration even longer.

See http://is.gd/kdA for more info.

re: Gmail has an interesting idea to thwart spammers

Matthew — Thu, 22 May 2008 19:14:11 GMT

I actually use a variant of this on my home mail server that fixes the problem of spammer's knowing this trick: Don't make the LHS of the + version of your email the same as your real email address.

So my real email address is mdouglass@...

When I give out my email address, I give out md+website@...

If they drop the +website and just send to md@..., the email is thrown away as obvious spam.

Yes, it's more polluting of the email namespace, but there's no way for the spammer to get back to my real address and I can still track down who sends me my spam (which is an interesting list, btw).

I'll also note that this occassionally gets funny reactions when you have to speak to real people at a company. Someone at vonage gave me a month free because they thought it was so cool I loved their service enough to have it in my email address. I tried to explain, but she just didn't understand.

re: Gmail has an interesting idea to thwart spammers

Sandi Hardmeier — Fri, 23 May 2008 03:17:30 GMT

I find services like sneakemail.com to be preferable. I can generate as many unique addresses as I want and label each with the web site name I will use it at, I can track how many emails each sneakemail address is receiving (and who they were from), and I can simply delete any sneakemail address that is being spammed.

re: Gmail has an interesting idea to thwart spammers

Rob Mueller — Fri, 23 May 2008 09:39:08 GMT

FYI (as a developer of FastMail) I'd like to point out we support this with a few extra tricks as well.

1. You get an entire sub-domain. So if your account is joe@fastmail.fm, you can sent email to anything@joe.fastmail.fm and it'll get to your account. This is more supported in webforms than +'s as well. Internally anything@joe.fastmail.fm is transformed to joe+anything@fastmail.fm

2. If you have a folder called "anything", then sending to joe+anything@fastmail.fm or anything@joe.fastmail.fm will automatically go to that folder. Additionally, it'll "fuzzy match" folder names, with case-insensitive matching, and with _, - and space all being equal. Also . will act as a folder separator. So if you send to mailing-lists.listname@joe.fastmail.fm and have a folder called "Mailing Lists/ListName", it'll automatically be put in that folder