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Comment by rognjen | Hacker News Reader

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rognjen

I just email myself ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

e: Also, I used to use https://750words.com which is quite similar.

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I use the Gmail "+" hack to mail myself on different topics.

name+ideas@ for app ideas

name+notes@ for random notes

name+writing@ for article ideas

(edit: formatting)

This is also a fun way to use an email-based coupon multiple times...I have yet to find an instance where this fails validation.

Isn’t that just an email hack?

No, not every email server supports it. For example, I know that Office 365 Exchange doesn't support it as I tried it yesterday.

that just means Office 365 has a bug in it, not that using that feature is an "email hack"

the plus syntax is part of the email address specification. any server that doesn't support it is by definition buggy because some mail won't work as expected or designed.

I don't believe that "a@" and "a+tag@" being treated as the same address is part of any specification, but I could be mistaken about this.

Many mail servers have a setting to configure which character to use; some default (or used to default?) to "-" instead of "+".

I think you're talking about just allowing the symbol. The plus sign is an allowed character in the local part in the spec. But mailservers are not required to treat it specially and apparently Exchange doesn't. That seems to be the thrust of the comment you answered to.

Tangentially, what's impossible to solve is all the developers out there who build input forms that will not accept an address with a "+" in it and flag it as invalid. They just use a regex that looks for alphabets, numbers, underscores, dots and one @ sign (I've also seen forms that won't accept any TLD other than .com).

The @ is a regular email character that Google happens to treat specially. Same with them disregarding the period character.

No, it's a gmail-specific "feature". Other mail services may also implement it, I guess.

Yeah, seems there is enough other services that a RFC (under "Subaddress Extension") has been proposed https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5233 Maybe it'll get enough steam.

Edit: doesn't mean everyone will use it though! But guess the plus sign in addresses would be more "email" than just email.

It’s nice that they’re trying to standardize it but it’s an impossible standard since you can’t assume that any particular domain adheres to to it so you end up with a whitelist either way.

I guess you're seeing it from the service owners point of view, and in that case it doesn't really matter no? AFAIK, it's for the owners of the email to use the subaddressing, not for others to magically come up and use subaddressing.

So as long as you, the user and owner of an address, know that your domain supports/not supports it, you can use it.

I don't understand who would have to add any allow/blocklists?

It is supported by most mail servers, I guess, and at some time nerds all over the world were heavily promoting this scheme.

I know someone who constantly complained that web site X or company Y are stupid, because they don't follow the RFCs, don't know the syntax of mail addresses, because mail validation in web forms often rejected anything with a plus sign.

The correct answer would have been "don't do it then" or maybe "how about configuring your Exim so that instead of '+' you're using '-' as a separator, but I suppose the complaining was a big part of the fun.

Companies don't follow RFCs, as a rule, bc the only mechanism or means of doing so is if the engineering team implementing the product is aware of the relevant RFCs, and can make a case for following them to the product team. (I.M.Exp.)

There's also a generational memory issue here, and I'm not aware of any C.S./C.E. programs that cover RFCs as part of the core curriculum.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc822

(viz. not a gmail-specific feature)

I didn't see where the + had any special significance in RFC822 beyond being part of an atom. foo+a and foo+b could be two different recipients if the server desired.

fair enough

I was using this well before gmail even existed; support is not universal, but it's certainly not a "gmail feature".

>>> I just email myself

Sometimes I don't even press "Send". Just keep pages of daily notes in the "Draft" folder ;)

This is how I use Sublime Text 3. I use it as my infinite clipboard / pastebin. After months of not using them I clear them out.

Funny I use sublime the same way. It's my go-to tool for when I need to manipulate text (ctrl+d is a godsend) for copying and pasting.

It's super powerful, but uses few resources compared to vscode/intellij. Not to mention it can handle massive text files like a champ.

Yeah, I can open my notes up in an instant which is why I use it. I dont use it to dev all the time, but I do enjoy ST. If ST4 becomes a major improvement (LSP?) I may reconsider.

I tried to develop with it (We use primarily python and typescript) but intellij is just so darn good. It's kinda clunkly for one-off files and text editing though, which is why I prefer sublime for a lot of that stuff.

Yeah I have a JetBrains subscription too, the editors powerful and I'm accustomed to it.

I used to do this once, then I’ve lost a couple of days to IMAP. Now I keep a bunch of text files.

It works well too! Too bad is not easy to fetch history.

The app is cool man good work! old school boy here made an vi alias to my journal.txt file and have been using it for 5+ years. alias opens the file in edit mode on a newline at the bottom. VI search lets me find whatever i need quickly all from the keyboard!

This whole 'email yourself as diary' seems like overkill to me when you could just write something yourself. Unless you are cool with sharing your diary with 3rd party services. Anyways it's still a cool little thing, just throwin my two cents.

In Gmail you can search by dates. And for convenience I've a filter for from me to me with journal title.

Stats wouldn't be possible (of the top of my head) but I don't care about that much.

I use `nano YYYYMMDD.md`.

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