This is an insecure solution that doesn't scale, and only works because nobody uses it.
I don't need to lock my door either, but that kind of security doesn't scale. I either use mailinator for throwaway email signups, or I have a spam gmail account.
But I'm not going to give out my main account+marker if I expect to want to be able to undo sharing my email in the future at some point that I try to follow an unsubscribe link and it doesn't work, or because my email might get sold: that's just downright silly. You think the kind of people that would sell email lists wouldn't run a regex to strip +spam markers from gmail accounts?
You literally have to apply a one-line regex to do that. It's security by obscurity. Anyone working at google should understand that.
+whatever is a valid email address, and just because Gmail automatically creates a "tagable" feature with it, doesn't mean Joe Blow can't have joe+blow@example.com be a REAL address that if you strip +blow from, it'll still be delivered to him.
everything I wrote applies only and specifically to gmail. it would be trivial to strip the +'s from every gmail address to get right into the person's main inbox.
If I don't trust a person to stop spamming me or sell my email address then I'm not going to trust a person not to do that.
> I don't know why you said that. Gmail addresses can't have +'s in them
I was saying that regarding to automatically stripping out +string from the email to thwart this. Gmail uses them as a special character, but it is a valid email character, along with all these http://stackoverflow.com/a/2049510
All right, but I was referring to automatically stripping out +string from emails at gmail's domain (which loads of people use, including me.) So we're talking past each other and it's not a valid reason why gmail shouldn't implement this. but thanks.
I don't need to lock my door either, but that kind of security doesn't scale. I either use mailinator for throwaway email signups, or I have a spam gmail account.
But I'm not going to give out my main account+marker if I expect to want to be able to undo sharing my email in the future at some point that I try to follow an unsubscribe link and it doesn't work, or because my email might get sold: that's just downright silly. You think the kind of people that would sell email lists wouldn't run a regex to strip +spam markers from gmail accounts?
You literally have to apply a one-line regex to do that. It's security by obscurity. Anyone working at google should understand that.