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27 Comments

crawminatcha Said,
April 4th, 2008 @9:41 pm  

Great in theory but most registration forms consider email addresses with ‘+’ in them as a invalid and won’t take them.

steveplace Said,
April 4th, 2008 @10:38 pm  

Another technique is to add a . somewhere in your email address.

bobbarker@gmail.com should work the same as
b.obbarker@gmail.com

It would require a bit more setup, but if the + doesn’t work when submitting, it’s a decent alternative.

yup Said,
April 4th, 2008 @10:39 pm  

yup

Vikrant Said,
April 4th, 2008 @10:57 pm  

Yes…the dots also work but it makes a little difficult to remember where and how many dots you had put while signing up for a particular website

dave Said,
April 4th, 2008 @11:36 pm  

You don’t think that the spammers can remove the +… if it’s a gmail account? just like they can remove .’s if they know it’s a gmail account.

Required Username Said,
April 5th, 2008 @1:21 am  

This does not work in the vast majority of cases. Theoretically it should but most scripts are improperly coded to not allow the + symbol so in practice this fails.
I once tried to implement this but the first 8 or so places I tried to use it would not allow the + symbol… kind of makes this (actually rather old… been recycled on so many blogs as it has been here) tip useless.

twerty Said,
April 5th, 2008 @3:09 am  
Craig Said,
April 5th, 2008 @4:16 am  

A good idea that I used a long time ago. This has nothing to do with gmail though. The use of the + character in this way has been a part of how email is handled since before the web existed.

Vikrant Said,
April 5th, 2008 @5:26 am  

@Craig…This looks limited to Gmail only. I tried it with Rediffmail and Yahoo and it did not work.

gxti Said,
April 5th, 2008 @6:34 am  

@Vikrant: Free services tend to bend the rules, but they get away with it because they have so many users. I run my own mail server and have actually never had an address made in this manner get rejected.

Of course, since I run my own, I could just set up regular aliases for myself and it would be impossible to tell apart from the “real” one :-)

Craig Said,
April 5th, 2008 @11:34 am  

@Vikrant: I just tried sending one to yahoo, and you’re right, I did get a permanent failure. But its not working on yahoo and one other service doesn’t mean it’s gmail only. This has been around since way before google existed, perhaps before the google founders were born! and it still is an obscure function on many mail systems, for anyone who finds it useful and cares to try.

victor louis Said,
April 6th, 2008 @12:55 pm  

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Reggie Said,
April 7th, 2008 @6:21 am  

It will be about 2 seconds before spammers add s/\+.*@/@/ if m/@gmail/ to their spam script

fudge Said,
April 8th, 2008 @11:17 am  

the net is awesome and shitty at same time. when good ideas come out to protect ourselves and people share it, they are just sharing it to the scumbag hackers and spammers as well so they can update their techniques and strategies. Not cool.

Virgul Said,
April 8th, 2008 @11:57 am  

The main reason this will not work in most websites is because of something called SQL. Herd or it? Well most people haven’t, but the programmers need to have. SQL is a very powerful, dangerous, and fun language. If you have a data base with 100’s or even 1000’s of emails you don’t want someone with knowledge of such things trying to hack in.

So yes, this is great if it works, but it also if bad if it does. If it works it means that the website is most likely venerable to SQL insertion and should not be used.

Talcum Said,
April 8th, 2008 @11:36 pm  

Have you tried Spamgourmet yet. This makes it super easy to tell who’s sending you SPAM and it doesn’t require too much trickery.

PEACE

Talcum Said,
April 8th, 2008 @11:39 pm  

If it wasn’t obvious the site is spamgourmet.com. Quick to set up. I set mine up a couple years ago and have already caught a few companies reselling my mail when they said they wouldn’t. Fortunately, the e-mail account created using spamgourmet will expire by default after 6 messages, and can be increased indefinitely if desired.

Chris Said,
April 11th, 2008 @10:24 am  

Thanks! This is something I’ll be using a lot.

steve Said,
April 18th, 2008 @9:41 am  

or just use sneakemail.com. I’ve been a paying member for almost 10 years now, and they’ve never let me down.

http://www.sneakemail.com

April 25th, 2008 @8:04 am  

Or just get a life … several in fact. Gmail (and most other mail servers) allows you to have multiple email addresses and to funnel them all to a single ‘catch-all’ address. When an address gets overwhelmed with spam, drop it. NEVER use the ‘catch-all’ address for any other purpose.

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