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Comment by supersan | Hacker News Reader

Hi, is there a link to your email privacy policy?

There are multiple people in this thread asking about email privacy policy. One asks about what assures that the list won't be sold. But one just asks what should happen if you get too many genuine replies.

I think it's pretty crazy that GMail, from my main account, doesn't let me just make a high-entropy word (buffalowafflesloth) and a tag, so that that email is instantly associated with the tag on my end. It should take me literally 2 clicks to write "hackernews notificaitn" and receive "buffalowafflesloth" in response, meaning anything sent to "buffalowafflesloth" gets to my main email with the "hackernews notificaitn" tag. (And I would give this service "buffalowafflesloth@gmail.com")

Google: if you're reading this do this. Let us give out emails that get a tag, so that later we can redirect it. You already kind-of do this with +SOMETHING but the +SOMETHING part can be removed to get the original email.

I think you overestimate the desire to screen email addresses and remove any "tags" that are on them. Most spammers and even companies don't even care WHAT the email is, as long as it doesn't bounce.

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.

I don't know why you said that. Gmail addresses can't have +'s in them

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/12096?hl=en

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.

Ah, I see. Yeah on @gmail I see what you're talking about. I was thinking a regex on just the username of the email to remove +word

The need for such a feature is so low, you can simply implement yourself with 5 lines of code.

There is mailgun, there is gmail api, there is programming.

thanks but I'd like google to do it. literally you/they just need to associate the string "myrealemailthatIwanttoseeeverythingat+spammymarker" with the string "cactusalligatorfortnight" so I can give out the later and it will act as the former does right now, with the relationship between the two strings being a secret. That's Google's job, not mine.

but if you think security by obscurity is enough that I should use a solution that instantly stops working once lots of people use it, then more power to you. I'm not going to do that.

also I use gmail because I don't run my own mailserver. I'm not about to start coding.

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