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Comment by vgb2k11 | Hacker News Reader

> if Google implemented my suggestion they could never be blacklisted

Google seems to have built their brand intentionally to be the opposite of what you're asking for though; and absolutely they could be blacklisted with a simple "GMAIL ADDRESSES NO LONGER ACCEPTED HERE".

>which already works but is security through obscurity.

I'm not sure which one you are saying is security through obscurity here... blah+real.id@gmail.com... or the high entropy mkKAjgsdf788hf87hf@gmail.com, both are obscure, but its a stretch of imagination to start labelling this a security issue.

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> > if Google implemented my suggestion they could never be blacklisted

> Google seems to have built their brand intentionally to be the opposite of what you're asking for though; and absolutely they could be blacklisted with a simple "GMAIL ADDRESSES NO LONGER ACCEPTED HERE".

I think "you can't block GMail" here is meant in the sense that "you can't block the Google crawler". It's certainly technically trivial to do so, but the opportunity cost from lost users will be, for most businesses, unacceptably high.

>I think "you can't block GMail" here is meant in the sense that "you can't block the Google crawler". It's certainly technically trivial to do so, but the opportunity cost from lost users will be, for most businesses, unacceptably high.

Excellent interpretation. Gmail = Google crawler. I've made a note of this now.

What needs to happen next is a deep discussion between yourself and logicallee, in the context of Google crawler as well as how to make gmail come further out of the dark ages with high entropy and no security obscurity.

it's not blah+real.id@gmail.com - it's real.id+blah@gmail.com which currently gets delivered to real.id@gmail.com with a tag of "blah". However this tag can be removed by spammers, hiding where they got my email address.

mkKAjgsdf788hf87hf is not the only possible high-entropy format, it could be if the type that gfycat uses such as "uncommongrimyladybug". That is quite hard to blacklist.

Nobody is ever going to stop accepting gmail addresses, that suggestion is pretty ridiculous. Especially since I suggest that these addresses should be delivered straight to your real inbox (unless they start getting spammed). There's no reason people should stop accepting them.

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