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Comment by HedgeMage | Hacker News Reader

FAIL

Why would I want to use my email address as an identity? I already get more than enough spam.

Virtually every site does this already, this just makes it more constant, secure, and convenient.

A lot of experienced users out there tends to provide each service a different email address (username+servicename@example.org, servicename@bar.example.org, etc.)

BrowserID breaks this.

BrowserID allows multiple emails, and I've tested "me@gmail.com" and "me+test@gmail.com", and both work.

I guess it can't be 100% automated, but you don't want automated logins anyway.

Speaking of such (which is a valid concern) I always use a nice feature from gmail which gives the ability to append +anything to your username. Mail will be forwarded to your inbox as usual where you can apply filtering to know whom as leaked your email. Hence you can use username+foobar@gmail.com while registering for foobar webapp.

This assumes that foobar webapp accepts + as a valid email local part character which is not always the case unfortunately (and against RFC) but that is another story.

Just sayin

Given that everyone knows about this feature, what's to stop spammers just stripping of the '+' portion?

you can get the same effect with arbitrary dots.

e.g. first.last@gmail.com is the same as firstlast@gmail.com

Still, they can remove all dots from gmail addresses.

You can hide the + portion of a Gmail address behind redirects and forwards, if you feel so inclined. It's a lot of work, but it does let you use the "deliveredto" operator in Gmail to automatically sort and discard spam like that.

Simple solution: give everyone address with "+suffix", and mark as junk any mail without it.

For stubborn services who don't accept "+" in email addresses use unique redirect aliases.

(Also, IIRC, Gmail ignores dots, i.e. "j.random.user@gmail.com" and "j.r.a.n.d.o.m.u.s.e.r@gmail.com" is the same address. Chose a canonical one with a dot somewhere, and filter the rest with exception for legimate senders.)

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