The World's Longest Alphabetical Email Address (2004) | Hacker News Reader

The World's Longest Alphabetical Email Address (2004)

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk.com

175 pointsahoy169 comments

I solve the spam problem by having my own domain with an infinite number of email addresses. Whenever I sign up for something I use $PERMUTE@mydomain.com, where PERMUTE is some easily-reversible permutation of the vendor's own name.

This has two benefits: I can easily route/filter incoming email from that vendor, and if I ever receive spam at that address I know which vendor sold my info.

Any specific vendors we should be aware of? :)

Can you do this without running your own email server? If buying email service from a vendor, costs are usually per user (per address).

I do this with FastMail aliases, works great!

Ahh aliases. Still show up in the main account though. I guess they can be filtered as spam.

Fastmail also has a catch all / wildcard option which I am using. You don't need to create aliases for every email; instead any email to *@mydomain.com goes to my single email inbox. And similarly I can send from anything@mydomain.com.

I use a subdomain for it. Anything to that subdomain is marked as read and filed in the "spam-adjacent" folder. I'll look in there for transactional stuff and marketing bs never increments my unread counter. Only real people appear in my actual inbox and it's basically email nirvana.

The way I do it is I use a subdomain for any aliased email, e.g. vendor.com@account.mydomain.com and then I just have rules to move anything sent to account.mydomain.com to a separate folder, then it never shows up in the main mailbox unless I put it there myself. Works fine!

I do it with the free email address that comes with my domain name. In this case I'm using gandi.net but I'm sure most domain name providers have a similar deal.

You can use aliases. You get 600 aliases with Fastmail for example.

But really you could just set up a 'catch all' and have everything routed to one inbox, then use filters to filter the emails to separate folders.

So emails to $PERMUTE1@domain.com could be filtered to a $PERMUTE1 folder, and so on.

Fastmail supports "subdomain addressing" out of the box. So if the email address is ... user@domain.com ... then you can use ... <anything>@user.domain.com ... without setting up any extra aliases, Fastmail will just handle it as if it's for user@domain.com.

And you can also reply from such addresses without extra configuration. On the desktop I use MailMate as my email client, which works great with dynamic aliases. The win is that you don't have to configure anything extra when signing up for some online service.

https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/addressing.html

You can do this in Google Suite btw, as you can configure a forwarding rule. The problem with Google Suite, last time I tried, is that they no longer want to sign emails with DKIM for such dynamic aliases, so you can receive emails just fine, but sending emails from such addresses is a problem if you have SPF/DKIM domain rules.

This is what I do, for both Fastmail and replicated for my own email domain.

That's good to know. I've only just switched 48 hours ago, so this is something I'll look at.

I had them handle my DNS for that domain so I'm assuming this won't require any extra setup.

One Fastmail alias can be "(asterisk)@domain.tld", by the way, so you can send and receive emails to every address possible. When you send an email from the (asterisk) alias, you can type whatever you want in the from address box. I use their DNS as my primary DNS for all my domains so I can email to/from all of them easily like this.

(asterisk) means the character itself, I can't figure out how to type one on this site though.

Edit: this wasn't a feature 3 years ago, I only discovered this 4 months ago when I added a few domains to my account and they added the (asterisk) aliases for those automatically.

If you have gmail (not sure what other providers support this), you can use + or . in your email address and add anything you want.

For example: myemail+twitter@example.com or myemail.youtube@example.com both go to myemail@example.com

Some email marketers are catching on to this approach though and automatically strip anything between “+” and the domain.

You could do subdomain aliasing instead (with Fastmail, or with Google Suite if you try hard enough) and there's no way to detect and strip that, since it looks and feels like a normal address.

It can be detected, just takes a bit more work (look up the domain's nameservers, see if they point to fastmail, if so rewrite the email address)

Does it work with a dot too? Is this a Google Suite thing?

It works with a dot too, so:

exampl.e@protonmail.com == example@protonmail.com == e.xample@protonmail.com

This is a good guide on how you can leverage this technique to identify which website you signed up for, and who sold your email to third parties.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/7425v7/protonma...

myemail.youtube@gmail.com would go to myemailyoutube@gmail.com (or my.email.you.tube@gmail.com). Gmail's email normalization is like: sed -e s/[+].*//g -e s/[.]//g

Assuming the vendor doesn't claim that having + is invalid. I've seen that quite a lot.

Tons of places don't accept that as a valid email though.

Not exactly so, dot in address is just ignored by gmail, so “myemail.youtube“ is equivalent to “myemailyoutube“, not to “myemail“. Plus sign works as you described.

I think you’re mistaken about how the dot works with gmail.

Last I remember, dots aren’t a separator like plus is, they just don’t count as part of the name.

So Gmail treats my.email@ and m.y.e.m.a.i.l@ as aliases of myemail@

The nonstandard dot behavior turned out to be a really bad idea. I've had numerous instances of people signing up for other services (e.g. Amazon) with my gmail address, adding various dot combinations. Whenever I have contacted Amazon (or others) to report a security issue--that I have access to someone else's account because "their" email address is routed to me, I just end up having a really unproductive conversation.

I do that with ProtonMail, however anybody with bad intentions can remove the suffix. But it helps tracing leaks and lazy spammers.

I do this on G Suite with a single license.

I use fast mail with a custom domain.

Yes. easyDNS offers this service. They call it a "catch all mailmap." You also need your "real" mail server ISP to be okay with getting unlimited addresses forwarded to them. Some ISPs don't like it because it makes SPF more difficult.

https://kb.easydns.com/knowledge/mailmaps/

I do this with migadu.com, as it gives you unlimited domains and addresses. Happy customer.

I've seen a lot of people doing this. Maybe we should have a public database of what company sold emails to who that everyone who did this can contribute to, with some kind of proof required.

Difficulty there is that many vendors are victims of data breaches, so they perhaps don't deserve to be demonized quite as much as if they'd outright sold the data. Could be difficult to prove which side of Hanlon's Razor they fall on.

That would be fair, but frankly as a user that gets the spam - I don't care. The damage to me is pretty much the same.

It would be important to stress it out on the page that it may be due to security negligence/failure rather that just data sale.

As a matter of fact.. they lost or gave away your info. They should reimburse you for that.

I’m working on something I call “datapoint tax”

Make this hoarding of data a (tax) liability. A policy like this will solve most problems.

That should depend on whether they informed the affected customers that their data was leaked in a breach or (if they weren't yet aware of the breach) how they react to the news that they have been breached.

If a company has a data breach, they most likely still have a security problem. While they may actually be victims if any 3d party software is exploited, it still comes down to system misconfiguration inany cases. And that would still be their fault.

I don't really care all that much if they sold it or lost it: they had it and were not good stewards of my data. That's all that I want to know.

You could argue that without painful consequences for breaches, companies will not care about preventing them from happening.

That would be nice.

That's a great idea. I do the same thing as the parent poster, and I've seen lots of email addresses compromised. If it's one that I care about, I will contact the company. (Last time it was Tektronix, before that it was Roku.) They usually deny that it could have been on their end, which is BS because nobody besides them ever had the email address (assuming I wasn't hacked locally). The most common scenario is the insider threat. Some low-paid IT person with access to their database sells the list for a few tens of dollars.

Obligatory mention: https://haveibeenpwned.com

So we need a haveibeensold.com or emailsellingsites.com (still available)

I do the same and in addition to reselling of personal information, it also shows when there was a data breach, as a whole bunch of spam starts pouring in the ones that are breached. Sometimes before an official announcement is made as the case was with Adobe.

I used to do this, and recall one particularly irate call from someone asking "why is my company name in your e-mail address!?!" They seemed to be concerned that I was impersonating them.

That's why I permute it, so it's not so blatantly obvious. OTOH most email signup handlers are robots nowadays and no real human ever pays much attention to them, so it hasn't really been a problem for me.

I do this as well using a not so well know trick that exists on most major email providers including gmail and iCloud: myemail+permute@icloud.com. Those emails will arrive at myemail@icloud.com

This won't help you tracking down which service leaked your e-mail address, because the first thing spammers do is trimming the +suffix.

That is unless the spammer was clever to do the following:

  providersWithSuffixSupport = ["icloud.com", "gmail.com", "googlemail.com", ...];
  if email.endsWithAnyOf(providersWithSuffixSupport) {
    email = email.trimBetweenFirstOccurrence("+", "@");
  }

I have a site with users, and while we have no interest in selling their addresses, it still strikes me as futile when people add "+mysite" to their address. It would take me 2 seconds in excel to zap all those appendages.

Not everybody uses the scheme for some futile security purpose, some sites are just a bit annoying with their outgoing addresses with their non-nefarious communication and the + scheme can be a nice way for rules.

I hadn't thought of that case. I've always had good luck simple simple rules like, "if @theirsite.com then move to folder".

How did you do this?

I do the same, but just use the vendors name as is.

I do it too. I've found some vendors that will not allow their company name in the email address. For example, samsung@mydomain.com cannot be used to register with any Samsung-operated service.

I do it too. I had one phone me, deeply suspicious, and demanding to know how their 'domain' came to be in my email address!

I thought it was an interesting blend of technical literacy both to notice and be bothered by that!

My fav bypass was using a string reversal on the company name.

What percentage of companies sell your info?

I will answer, since I have been following this strategy for almost 20 years.

In my experience, very, very few companies sell email addresses. Maybe 1% or fewer. The vast majority of spam tied to company-specific addresses is the result of data breaches. I get spam to my (old) linkedin, dropbox, equifax addresses - all starting after they were hacked.

I do this too, and this is also my experience. In fact, at first I expected my ad-hoc email addresses to be the target of a good amount of spam, but I was surprised to find this almost never happens.

I have to concur. The spam I'm getting only comes to aliases I published on some public-facing site. So I get a lot of spam for fb@, and hn_work@ (used in "Who wants to be hired?" posts), but surprisingly not hn@ (which is in my profile) or hello@ (used on my website). I don't think I got spam for any alias I used only to register an account with some vendor.

I did this for a while. I gave up because it just wasn't worth the effort. I would run into exceptions to my permutation rule maybe. Or I signed up for an account and forgot which email I used so couldn't reset the password. Things like that.

> This has two benefits: I can easily route/filter incoming email from that vendor, and if I ever receive spam at that address I know which vendor sold my info.

There's just nothing actionable to do with this information. OK, so I caught badcompany.com giving my email address to marketingfirm.com. But the damage is already done. Sure, I can send them a nasty email, but it'll just get ignored or whatever.

I just started generating random addresses and putting them in password manager. The actionable bit is permanently black-holing all incoming mail to that address if/when I no longer need the service, or the "spam" rate gets too high.

I use gmail, so I just use the "Report as spam" option. I'm assuming Google uses that information in some way when calculating spam scores. So if enough people do the same, those emails will just start getting sent to spam automatically for huge amounts of people, and therefore punishing those folks for doing it in the first place. That seems more effective to me.

And I just never really had that big of an issue with spam where I needed to black-hole a specific email address. So for me it just wasn't worth the effort.

People using "report as spam" is what made gmail such a great spam filter. Is also the reason google has such high market share of public email addresses. It's also why people running their own mail servers are afraid of being blacklisted by google.

Yesterday I used the report as spam feature on an email from Microsoft.

The footer had no unsubscribe option and the "manage communication preferences" requires a login/password combo that I couldn't be bothered to reset for my new geolocation.

I doubt this'll make a dent in Microsoft.com's spam score.

More than 3 years ago I moved from a single gmail address that had a ton of spam, to a Fastmail wildcard domain with a rule for each individual/company that emails me. I use a randomly generated, 7-character username created from a-z and 0-9 for each address, stored in my password manager. eg. The email address for my Reddit account might be rkd64id@example.com.

While I think this scheme is perfection in terms of privacy and security in knowing which company sells or breaches my email address... the fact is I haven't gotten a single unsolicited email in the entire 3+ years. Not a single message that hit a spam/junk filter, and not one email that wasn't expected based on whitelisted rules. The closest exception is Amazon who shares your email address with their shippers for delivery notifications; while I do receive 3rd party mail regarding legitimate Amazon deliveries, I've never received any spam to that Amazon address.

I have come to a conclusion as to why I have never received a single spam email since switching to this scheme. When I transitioned my GitHub account away from the old gmail address, I used the privacy option to not publish my REAL email address in Git logs pushed to GitHub. I deleted my old repos, and re-imported using the GitHub-wrapped email address. Thus I surmise that for those of us who are developers pushing code to public Git repositories, the vast majority of the spam you receive is because your email address can be very easily scraped from those Git logs.

I expect to migrate back to a single email address in the future, for a singular reason: as I get older I cannot imagine managing these email filters and password manager entries. Eventually I will need to simplify things.

> Sure, I can send them a nasty email, but it'll just get ignored or whatever.

If you're in the EU, then send it to their DPO instead, and CC the national data protection authorities.

I don't think it's quite that simple. Ignoring the fact that I'm not in the EU, the company would also have to have some sort of presence in the EU for that to have any effect. And then which company do I send it to? The original one? Or the one they shared my address with and is now spamming me? Presumably the latter, since they are the one sending the spam. But if the initial company shared my email address with that company, they probably shared it with a lot of others, too. And what are the chances someone who has resorted to these sorts of tactics is going to care anyway?

> he company would also have to have some sort of presence in the EU

If you were in the EU, they wouldn't have to have presence in the EU to fall under GDPR.

> And then which company do I send it to?

Both! One shared your data with a third party without your explicit consent, for non-essential reasons, the other one is processing it without your explicit consent.

> And what are the chances someone who has resorted to these sorts of tactics is going to care anyway?

Depends. A lot of business do awful stuff for as long as nobody cares enough to start raising fuss about it.

Speaking of that, for extra effect, complain about it on Twitter and Facebook, linking relevant companies' public profiles/pages. In general, it seems a lot of companies (particularly non-tech ones) are extremely sensitive about social media posts.

> And what are the chances someone who has resorted to these sorts of tactics is going to care anyway?

https://www.enforcementtracker.com/

(And the rules here: https://gdpr.eu/fines/)

I just search my email for the company name or the address I used.

The action one can take is that if the address is distributed and you start receiving unwanted mail, you can filter out messages to that address.

> There's just nothing actionable to do with this information.

Of course there is. When it happens I add an entry to my procmailrc that routes those emails directly to my spam folder, and I never see them again. And I never do business with that company again.

Maybe there is a way to publicly shame them, even if only a low fraction of users forwards bad actors to a collaborative list

I do pretty much the same thing. Although I don't do a lot of email sign up stuff anyways.

I do this using a catchall account with Fastmail, but I don't even bother obfuscating the vendor name. Occasionally they don't let you use an email with their name in it, which which case I add 'isdumb' to their domain and then use it.

It happens occasionally that they get confused, but so far I haven't run into any issues.

I do agree in principal that it would be better to have some sort of hash that maps their domain to the e-mail in a way that is easy for me to know but hard for someone else to figure out. Ideally in a way that is still reasonably easy to pronounce over the phone.

What would be really slick is to have such functionality integrated into a password manager.

Also do this, with two variations:

1. Use a catch all alias (zero-effort)

2. Just use the domain or in some cases company name

3. Use a sub-domain

The sub-domain is essential for catch-all, otherwise you get a crazy amount of spam. I forward it all to a single Gmail address, have a rule to move it to a specific folder (based on "to" address), and otherwise let Gmail spam filtering do it's thing.

I've been doing this since early 2000's, and had very few issues with using domain/company. One or two that dis-allowed it, a couple confused humans.

> The sub-domain is essential for catch-all, otherwise you get a crazy amount of spam.

Seconding this. I get a larger portion of targeted spam (addresses that I gave out in the past) with a sub-domain catch-all. At a normal second-level domain catch-all, I get more random spam addressed to common addresses like accounts@, billing@, and sales@.

Yahoo mail has a feature under Mailboxes, called "Disposable email address" that allows you to pretty much do the same. You choose a "base" name, and then you can create upto 500 disposable addresses of the form basename-keyword@yahoo.com - you can choose the "keyword" based on the site you're signing up for, the basename stays constant. All mails to the disposable address get delivered to your normal mailbox, but you can go and delete a disposable address or filter it to spam. Also, both the basename and keyword remain untraceable to your actual address (unlike gmail's + format that has your base email id embedded in it).

I used to use this earlier, but then I couldn't find the setting easily on their mobile web interface and got tired of either switching to the desktop version or waiting to get to a desktop to complete a signup. Nowadays, I just report spam if there's no unsubscribe option.

I've been using me+company@mymail.com ever since. It works mostly except for the real bad websites that disallow plus signs.

I got two mails telling me I cannot use the company name in my e-mail, they'd file for fraud if I would.

(got resolved by explaining how e-mail works, but still)

This is the easiest and most widely available solution imo. I use ProtonMail which allows for plus addressing. Gmail also offers this feature if I recall correctly.

The local part of an email address can also contain spaces if in quotes:

  "John Smith"@example.com

In fact, the local part is a set of elements separated by dots, each of which can be quoted. The following is valid:

  "John Smith@example.com".foo."John Smith".!$%^&*/@example.com

Of course, barely anything supports this.

With SMTPUTF8, you can do pretty much anything, including emoji in email addresses. Not much supports this, either.

Handling comments in emails is fun too!

    Pete(A nice \) chap) <pete(his account)@silly.test(his host)>

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322#appendix-A.5

Note that comments are only valid in mail headers, but not smtp.

Generally even besides CFWS related differences there are some differences in between which email addresses SMTP allows and which are allowed in mail headers....

Lastly given that quoting in the local part as well as some special forms of the domain part are not supported by most programs it's often sensible to reject them, i.e. treat them as invalid even through technically they are not. (But you really should support internationalized mails!)

The format of an email address is:

[whatever the server accepts]@[valid domain name]

No more, no less. Although "server" here also includes anything in-between that may barf on a local part or (sometimes) even a domain name it doesn't like. For example, some forms don't like emails to top level domains.

What about user@[127.0.0.1] (with the brackets)

Don't the brackets mean that it's a ipv6 address? I would've thought it's invalid, because the ip isnt colon separated. (Just guessing here)

There are various schemes for mapping IPv4 addresses in the IPv6 address space, for example

[::ffff:127.0.0.1]

[64:ff9b::127.0.0.1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_address#Special_addresses

You may be thinking of URLs. The host specification differs between the two standards^H^H^H^H^H^H conventions.

In the email addressing standard (RFC 5321), the brackets means it's an IP address literal. If you add in an IPv6 tag (e.g., [IPv6:1::1]), you get IPv6 support as well.

Ah yes, you can use an IP address instead of a domain! I'd completely forgotten about that because nowadays it's so very unlikely to work with anything.

> Of course, barely anything supports this.

Yahoo! Mail always has supported a space in the local part because David Filo wanted to ensure it was supported. His @yahoo.com email address had a space in it to ensure that he’d know if it was ever broken.

Frustratingly, in the opposite realm, I setup a really short address on my domain I wanted to use for business correspondence (b@mydomain.com), and it's astonishing how many websites/forms reject it due to being "invalid" :<

I usually try a@b.com for forms I don't care about, but often have to resort to the more verbose nobody@nowhere.com when the validator complains about the former being too short...

webmaster@$whateverdomainyouresurfing is the right thing to do. Stomping on other people's domains is rude.

or just me@example.com

This sometimes gives you special/admin access. Good if you are security testing something, bad if you accidentally hack a site.

example.com and example.org were specifically reserved for testing: https://www.iana.org/domains/reserved

I've seen sites that specifically deny @example.com email addresses.

Which is perfectly reasonable. They're looking for an email address that they can reasonably expect to deliver mail to, not just an address that is technically valid.

I bet the guy who owns test.com gets a lot of interesting junk.

The domain nowhere.com is real and has MX records pointing to email-hosting.net.au, which appears to have an Exim SMTP server running. Is nobody@nowhere.com meant for public use as a fake email address, or is it just something of yours, or what?

When I need an email address for something that should not need my email address and for which I have no interest whatsoever in receiving any emails sent to, I use something @mouse-potato.com.

Mouse-potato.com was registered in 1997 by, if I remember correctly, the owner of the Seattle ISP Northwest Nexus. Northwest Nexus is long gone, but he or someone has kept mouse-potato.com alive ever since.

The MX record for mouse-potato.com points to mail.mouse-potato.com. The A record for that, www.mouse-potato.com, and mouse-potato.com all give 127.0.0.1.

Give some spammer an @mouse-potato.com address, and hopefully they send the spam from the same machine their own SMTP server is on, and so end up just trying to send it to themselves.

After he registered it, he stated publicly that it was specifically registered for Northwest Nexus customers, and anyone else who wanted to use it, for making fake email addresses.

> The domain nowhere.com is real and has MX records pointing to email-hosting.net.au, which appears to have an Exim SMTP server running. Is nobody@nowhere.com meant for public use as a fake email address, or is it just something of yours, or what?

It's just my own go-to (not-) fake e-mail. I probably tried it the first time when I was 12, and it worked, so whoever actually owns nobody@nowhere.com must be getting a lot of junk... At some point I realized the e-mail actually exists, but oh well... I figure with an e-mail like that they never expected it to be exactly private

Who knows what they intended? It's probably not very nice to load them up with extra spam just because you're lazy (? I mean really, what are you gaining here?)

I own a domain that is similar (in a "1337" way) to the domain of a CRM SaaS operation. At least once a week one of their customers signs up using my domain in a throwaway fake email address. I find it extremely frustrating. Because of their architecture and mine there is no easy way for me to filter these messages so I am often stuck with the spam in my inbox. I don't hold a grudge or anything, but I wish people would think before they fill in someone else's perfectly valid info into a form they don't want to give their own info to.

I wish there were a reference set of validated C routines that corresponded to the [most important] RFCs and that everybody could be persuaded to use them.

We pretty much have this for crypto, but for everything else on the internet it still seems like the wild west.

I have such a routine for e-mail addresses:

    int is_valid_email(const char* email) {
        return strlen(email) > 0;
    }

You're welcome. Coincidentally it also works for validating people's names and addresses too.

That isn't very good. I would think better would be:

    int is_valid_email(const char*email) {
        return !!*email;
    }

But, either way, it isn't good enough, because it is considered valid even if there is no at sign. With some applications, such as email on a local system, you don't need to worry about that, but on internet, you will need to check that there is a at sign in the email address. So, better would be to check if there is a at sign, and if so, then it is considered to be valid.

Therefore, probably the best way is:

    int is_valid_email(const char*email) {
        return !!strchr(email,'@');
    }

I don't see the difference between the one that was linked and the first one you posted, other than the other one invoking undefined behavior if not passed a null-terminated string.

The difference is that it is potentially more efficient (depending what the optimizer does).

(At least, it is how I do C programming.)

I think you could reasonably go a step further and require that there be at least one character before and after the at sign. And you could probably ban ASCII control characters from appearing anywhere in the address. Depending on your needs, you might even want to try resolving the hostname or connecting to the SMTP server.

In a real-world application, you don't just want to check if an address meets an RFC; you want an address you can use throughout your application. Email addresses such as `h\@x0rz@!!!` or `\n@\0` or `@` might be RFC-compliant, but they are plainly ridiculous and would never be used by a real user. Any time/effort you spend writing tests or fixing bugs caused by permitting these esoteric addresses would be better spent on anything else.

Any time/effort you spend writing tests or fixing bugs caused by permitting whitespaces in filenames would be better spent on anything else.

Any time/effort you spend writing tests or fixing bugs caused by permitting Unicode characters in domain names would be better spent on anything else.

Any time/effort you spend writing tests or fixing bugs caused by permitting leap seconds in timestamps would be better spent on anything else.

Etc.

My favorite `""@example.com`.

The semantically empty local part ;=)

Oh and `""@[Ipv6:someipv6addres]` because who says that the domain system needs to be used.

(Disclaimer: I don't remember if it was Ipv6 or ip-v6, I would have to look that up).

Some years ago I realized that the last two letters of my first name is the same as a country TLD.

So I registered the domain [letters 2 to (n-2)].[TLD], giving me an email address of [first letter]@letters 2 to (n-2)].[TLD] - i.e. something in the vein of r@ebec.ca.

I thought that would be a great time saver, but to my chagrin it turns out that both computers and humans tend to have difficulty understanding such an unusual scheme.

I tried to use the @ as an A in an email address once and found it nearly impossible to relay to other humans.

I've been rejected because i use an .link domain, so it has 4 characters and they theft emails without 3 TLD characters! Luckily I also have an .com in that case.

On the signup page:

> Each FREE mailbox account comes with 25MB of storage capacity, which is a lot more than what is offered by most free email providers. This can allow you to store over 250,000 email messages.

This has not aged well since 2003. The amount of bloat in emails now is quite high since everybody who sends emails wants to use HTML with embeds while also inserting tracking pixels, images, links, etc.

The page also advertises flash games. Old school.

Fun fact there are 3(+?) ways to embed images:

1. Using a link like in a normal website => might not load.

2. Using a data uri => increases mail size, there is no rfc as far as I know which states that this even had to be supported.

3. Using a cid , link as specified by the mail rfc => increased size and more complex (you basically put a link in the http body which refers to another body in the multiparty/mixed body it's in by the unique cid. Which is supposed to be works unique but quite to often is not.

Gmail blew our collective minds when they started with, what, 1 GB free? And the gimmicky counter on the login page showing increasing storage free forever at some rate of a few more kilobytes per second.

As I recall, it was common to have 10 MB inbox storage for free email accounts around that time.

Congratulations on breaking the HN mobile layout!

Ahhhh so that’s what happened!

I probably refreshed the page a dozen times

One must never forget to use the CSS rule `word-break: break-word;` on user generated content.

I get annoyed when forms can't process a '+' in my address.

Not processing '+' is a way for spammers to self identify.

If it was about being able to spam, they'd just silently strip the + part. I think it's just ignorance ... in my own mailserver I have a custom separator that usually doesn't trip validation functions.

This assumes the “+” is not a trick to see if they are stripping the “+” from the username of the email address; which then is automatically flagged as SPAM. Of course this assumes you’re creating a new email per contact, not just using a feature that was never intended as a anti-spam tool.

I used - in the qmail days and never had any problems. The + causes enough problems that I've basically stopped using it.

People seem to spam me, but gmail is pretty good at filtering all that stuff into the "Promotions" folder, which is nice.

Can you go into a little more detail or provide a pseudo example?

I'm confused at how this allows spammers to self-identity.

If they strip it out you know the want to spam you so can block their domain and/or decline to sign up.

And if they don't strip it, you can add a unique identifier to your address for every site you use it on, and know who sold your address.

This is intentional. It's because the people who own the site know the gmail <realemail>+thisisspam@gmail.com trick and they prevent people using that trick.

I've fixed this issue at a large company, and it was not intentional, but poorly written regex

Using regex on email is a horrible idea unless there are very well defined blocks - such as only allowing a given top level domain.

Fair enough. I failed to apply Hanlon's razor.

You can deal with this by using subdomain tags on some providers. user@tag.domain.com rather than user+tag@domain.com.

I have only a handful of addresses on my machine so implemented the letter ‘f’ as the selector (none of the usernames nor various full name aliases have that letter in them). I really doubt any spammer could screen that out :-)

I have my own e-mail addresses at rhabarberbarbarabarbarbarenbartbarbierbierbar.com that I use for fun and testing form validation. It is surprisingly rare that I find sites that break over it.

Hah! I was just showing that video to a friend last night.

I used to have myself@iwenttodefcon7.andalligotwas.thislousyemailaddress.com and I used it for quite a bit of testing too. Broke all sorts of things, either because of length or multiple levels of subdomain or who knows what.

I'd love a service that gives you all sorts of peculiar-but-valid addresses for testing... hmm. Is there a market here?

I don't speak German, but I used Youtube's auto-translate captions to get the gist of what I was seeing.... that is amazing.

Oh I just realized that the name was that Bart barbier thing ;). I first thought it's random letters.

I've seriously considered getting some long and meaningless domain (although not that long) for some serious use. I'd probably go with something like a prefix of 'm' (for "mail") followed by 64 random bits in hex, so something like m95aaa5aea09bdc67.com.

Addresses there would only be used as the recovery addresses for vital services such as bank and brokerage accounts, domain registrar accounts, telephone company accounts, and mail hosting accounts, and that's probably all.

By "recovery address" I mean the address that the service provider will use if someone initiates an "I forgot my password and lost my 2FA device!" password reset. It's any address that if someone takes control of they can take over your account at that service starting from at most your user name on that service.

Why a meaningless name like m95aaa5aea09bdc67.com? To minimize the risk of someone coming in and trying to take it over via a trademark dispute. For this I want domain name that I can be very sure I can keep as long as the current domain system is still in place.

Fun fact: having this article on the front page made my iphone render all the front page text smaller so it could fit the full URL. When I hid the listing, text sizing went back to normal.

Yet another side-effect of a super long domain name!

Weird, it just causes horizontal scrolling for me on mobile safari.

Apparently, this was previously posted here in 2013. Nobody commented on it or upvoted it.

I mean, there are easier and more universal ways to break signup forms without needing a service. If that is what you are into.

Well, you can't because signups aren't available right now.

This domain makes me wonder if there’s a domain length limit on HN.

Edit: RFC 1035 section 2.3.4 says 255 octets. Could be shorter here, though. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1035

DNS label name limit is 63 characters, and total length limit 255 (or thereabouts). Maybe newer implementations allow longer names, you'd have to test though.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32290167/what-is-the-max...

You can have a lot more fun than that if you want to break things. An IP address has lots of valid formats nobody uses.

    ;; ANSWER SECTION:
    wikipedia.org.  599 IN A    208.80.154.224

Lets try this in decimal:

http://3494943456/

Sort of cool, but what happens if we overflow it by adding 232?

    >>> 3494943456 + 2**32

http://7789910752/

I mean that's cool, but how far can we go?

    >>> 3494943456 + (2**32) ** 2

http://18446744077204495072/

So that still works, what about going further?

    >>> 3494943456 + (2**32) ** 100

http://19769064789825639936542264398379633403153906826257738...

Going further actually breaks some browsers (Firefox can handle longer than Internet Explorer for example), breaks web servers because they log the full version before it is transformed, and even acts as a fingerprinting vector. The limit is usually in the several hundred kilobyte range, and depending on the way that the underlying operating system handles it, things get seriously broken very quickly.

Interestingly, Safari on iOS only works with the first link you posted. From the first overflow it displays an invalid URL error.

You should probably include the OS+browser combo you used, as it does not seem to be universal.

First and last work for me on mobile Safari, but not the middle two.

In Firefox, when I hover over http://3494943456/ it displays as http://208.80.154.224 in the lower left, as does 1844... and 197690..., BUT http://7789910752/ displays as exactly that string. It likewise navigates to the first, third, and fourth links but breaks on your second.

Way back in high school I used to use decimal ip addresses to bypass the network content filter. It doesn't work as well these days as so many sites are virtual hosted.

> and total length limit 255 (or thereabouts)

The continuous discussion about "thereabouts" is because the 255 bytes limit applies to encoded name fields (in DNS messages), not domain names as we usually write them in dotted format.

Since the encoded format is that each label is preceded by its length and the whole domain ends by 'root' (i.e. 0x00) this means that domains names as we usually write them are limited to 253 bytes, including the dots (we don't write the 'root' label and label lengths are replaced by dots except the first one, that's 2 bytes to subtract from 255).

I guess I can plug my max char .com domain too here. No email tho.

http://bigtittyjapanesewomenthatlooklikecutecatsandipromisen...

I love that it stores 6000 mails in 6.0 Megabytes.

Can HackerNews limit username lengths? This post causes horizontal overflow in the list and detail view.

Safari - iOS

Why does this read like a JIRA comment left by a PM

I was wondering why my Android Firefox was zoomed in a bit on the front page, this is the second time this week I've seen it, now I know!

All of my web apps limit email addresses to 128 characters. This domain alone is 67. If you exceed the 128 character limit then I'm not sure I want you to sign up anyway...

While this seems excessive this would actually be easier to use-

amazonsupport@abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk.com

Just like your mom.

https://your.mom/

The URL of this story will now screw up the hckrnews.com UI for about a week.

Oh joy, OP's username trashed mobile safari's rendering of HN

it's the linked domain name, OP's username is "ahoy"

This must have been a QA nightmare when it originally launched

No longer accepting new signups, which is disappointing :(

I think the links at the bottom are more interesting than the site

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