[Discuss] box.net

[gboyce at badbelly.com (Gregory Boyce)]

On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 2:05 PM, Theodore Ruegsegger <gruntly at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dan O'Donovan wrote:
>> Just in case anyone here isn't aware of this, you can also use disposable email address' with Google's gmail.
> ...
>> your.account+<boxnet>@gmail.com
>
> I certainly wasn't aware of it. Looks like a nice trick; I tried it
> and it worked (I omitted the angle brackets, assuming you meant them
> to indicate a variable).
>
> But how is this address disposable? I can see that if I get spam at
> myaccount+boxnet at gmail.com I'll know that boxnet compromised the
> address but, having established that, how do I "dispose" of the
> address? Do you mean I add a line in my filters to reject any mail
> with that address?
>
> Hmm...after writing the above and thinking about it, I guess that must
> be exactly what you mean! Works for me. Thanks for a good tip. I sure
> missed the old mailshell.com service.
>
> Thinking about it some more, as this becomes generally known, won't
> spammers simply add a script truncate any gmail address with a + in
> it, yielding a valid and no-longer-traceable address? Or can we count
> on them to be really, really lazy?

foo+variable is not new, although it isn't very widely used.  Spammer
should already be working around it, although I guess they don't.  I
find its a less useful trick though due to a large number of websites
not allowing + in email addresses even though the RFC allows them.

Google also allows you to insert . characters in your e-mail
addresses.  username, user.name, u.sername, etc are all the same
account.  You can only get a few uses out of that trick though.