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Comment by findjashua | Hacker News Reader

With gmail, you can create a custom email for each service, like so: youremail+service@gmail.com

Later on, if the service doesn't let you unsubscribe, or sells your email to other spammers, you can just set a filter to trash emails sent to youremail+service@gmail.com

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Anyone with half a clue that is doing heavy marketing via email, knows to strip the stuff after the +. BTW, the + is part of the email specification, and technically any email server not supporting it is broken.

Additionally, either through malice or mistake many email forms disallow + signs entirely.

Although '+' is an acceptable symbol, there's actually nothing in the RFCs that mandates sub-addressing behaviour. The closest you'll get is RFC5233 that defines it for the Sieve filtering language. So although very common, sub-address behaviour is not a standards requirement and should not be presumed.

By "heavy marketing" I presume you mean spammers. If not, be warned, sub-address stripping will mean nondelivery in some cases and could trigger blacklisting via honeypots.

With gmail, my process with unwanted emails is:

1) Locate and click the "Unsubscribe" link. Usually, that is it.

2) If there is no "Unsubscribe" link, or if it requires more than one subsequent click, then "Report Spam"

3) ... if I get an email after unsubscribing, "Report Spam" straight away

The "unsubscribe" link is just as likely to be malicous as any other link in an unwanted email. For this reason, I skip your set #1.

The main problem with this is that many services won't allow your mail address to have a + in it.

I've been doing something similar, except with a Google Apps catch-all address.

Unfortunately, a lot of spammers use BCC, so AFAIK for those emails there's no way to figure out which email address was compromised, and thus no easy way to filter them out en masse.

The easiest way is to filter based on the "Delivered-To" header (click on "view original" to see all headers).

No amount of BCC'ing affects that header because it is set by gmail itself, not by the emitter.

Wow. This is amazing.

Time to go back and look through all my spam and filter them all. =)

I only wish I kept more of them around...

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