this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
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every provider who supports aliases. like [email protected] where everything after the + is exchangeable. so you can use a 'different' mail for every service you use and just block where spam comes from via the alias.
Isn’t it pretty widely known that many email providers support this?
I just assume spammers would know enough to remove everything from the ‘+’ until the ‘@‘. It’s not like they’re trying to be sparing with recipients. Why not just send to both?
Yes. It is pretty easy to work around, but if that is the only tool you have it still can be used to junk a majority of the crap.
If you want a robust solution you can use disposable aliases (which are basically randomly generated) or signed addresses.
I do the latter. So I would generate an email like
[email protected]. If you strip or change the string at the end (which is a small HMAC) your message will go straight to junk. It isn't perfect because there is only 4 bytes of entropy in the signature but a dedicated attacker will find a better way to spam me anyways.Personally I'm not a fan of "plus aliasing" because it gives away your base address, and it's trivial for spammers to strip the alias. I prefer aliases that completely hide the base address.
Its also VERY poorly and haphazardly handled in websites. Often they won't let me create an account with it. Or I will be able to create an account using the alias, but then I am left unable to login.
That's why we need formal rules. Once regulations are in place (with big penalties) websites magically start to function properly.
... Until they randomize the part before the plus
They don't need to randomize it, just strip it.
They strip the part after and including the plus. And yea, that's exactly what is done. People need to stop assuming malicious actors are dumb and incapable of reading an RFC.
Not best solution I guess. How about generic sites? Like Git commit mail, my website, Mastodon etc. where I can't add that postfix.
What I do is have some general mailboxes then signed addresses on top of that.
So if you email blog@ or kevincox@ you will get a fairly high level of spam filtering. I also have a few other "memorable" addresses that get reduced spam filtering. If you use the unique signed address that I use for signing up to services, newsletters or whatever where the address is private to a specific service then you basically skip spam filtering. Of course if you abuse that privilege then I will outright block the signed address.
Basically by allowing friends and "trusted" services through the spam filter I can crank up the difficulty for unknown senders.
Why can't you use +-aliases in Git, Mastodon, etc.?
Edit:
git config --local user.email "[email protected]"shouldn't cause any issues.