One of my favorite GMail features is plus addressing [?]. I already, with my torrez.org domain, hand out tons of aliases when signing up for things, and so being able to continue that method of tracking where an email address was harvested from is very useful.
Today I received five pieces of spam, all of them were sent to my gmail address without the trailing + part. Meaning, I believe, that spam harvesting spiders are smart enough to clip that little tag off before committing the address to their database. I don't believe I have ever placed my address on a spiderable page without some sort of + addressing tag.
Also, two web forms I have filled out in the past week have filtered the + in my gmail address as a space (which is understandable, it's a method of urlencoding spaces), rendering the account I was creating unusable.
I like the idea of plus addressing, but I am afraid it's not going to be as useful as I had hoped if spam harvesters are clever enough to know when they're being tricked, and web developers are filtering out the plus character in registration pages.
Charles
spiders can indeed cut off + addresses. However, I use a unique name, e.g., note67342@mydomain.com or buydotcom@mydomain.com. So far, these seem to foil them. Well - not foil them really, but I can just filter out the address once it becomes spam infected - and I know where it was harvested from.
thursday
april, 22 2004
einstein
I think that's what torrez was talking about in his first paragraph.
thursday
april, 22 2004
mat
I've already gotten some + addressed spam, after just using it a handful of times. (I haven't gotten any where the address has been truncated, though). This was harvested from my own site, fittingly. Oh well... at least the filter caught it.
friday
april, 23 2004
Monkeyboy
The harvesters may not actually be smart. Progranners who haven't read the RFC often think that + is not a legal character in email addresses and code under that assumption. Depending on how it is written, a parser could easily mistake the + for then end of your address rather than part of it.
monday
april, 26 2004
jayanth
Hi,
I was wondering if you had a spare gmail invite. I would really appreciate it if you could send me one. My email address is technieks@yahoo.com.
Thanks,
jayanth.
wednesday
may, 5 2004
Windy
Please Please Please
I would like to test gmail. Please send me an invitation to windyswonderland[at]yahoo.com
monday
may, 17 2004
nitin
Id would like I invite too, If someone could help
tuesday
june, 15 2004
Rags
Hi,
I understand the penchant for getting a gmail account.
Try at eBay!!..You might get lucky!...
btw.,does anyone have a link for some definitive
article on how 'plus_addressing' works??...I mean
the technicality of it!
Thanks.
sunday
july, 4 2004