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Re: [LUG] email

 

On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 7:09 AM, Gordon Henderson wrote:
> I can put +anything I like after gordon and before @drogon.net and my
> email system will accept it, so I can create a new email address on the
> fly - so when I started to get spam to gordon+aria, then I knew they'd
> either sold my email address or had a virus/trojan infect one of their
> PCs...
>
> I think some spammers are wise to it though.

I would expect them to be: if I were to write a bot that scraped email
addresses I would make sure that, if it would come across
foo+bar@xxxxxxxxxxx, also foo@xxxxxxxxxxx would be added to the
database as well. (But then, these bots are, generally, pretty daft
and they're more likely to only add bar@xxxxxxxxxxx in this case.)

Some MTAs use hypens instead of plus signs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_address#Sub-addressing

And of course, if you have written your own MTA, you can make it
accept all addresses where the local part started with gordon. But I
doubt that would be worth the trouble.

Martijn.

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