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Comment by mriet | Hacker News Reader

The SMTP standard allows you to add a "suffix" to part of your email address that is ignored when delivering the message.

I never give out my raw email address, I use: - name+twitter@gmail.com for twitter - name+amazon@gmail.com for amazon - name+hacknews@gmail.com for HN etc

Makes it very easy to track down who sold out me email -- and filter on it.

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I know this "trick" made the rounds several years ago. I figured it seems like a temporary solution only; once companies selling your data or hackers harvesting it get the memo they'd just remove the +xxxx part and then what?

I just have a shell alias "email" that randomly generates me one. It generates completely random base64 strings, no "name" part or such. Together with an addon for thunderbird to always answer with the sender address that was used to receive a mail, this makes for a very seamless experience.

If I want to see who leaked my address I just search my email archive to see where I first used it. Also of course this means using a password manager. I opt for keepassxc.

Frustratingly, this is not as universally supported as it should be.

Back in 2018 I bought a plane ticket from Eurowings and I gave them an email address with that pattern, and while they were happy to accept the email address on the booking page and take my money, the ticket and login systems didn’t, and I had to get a refund and a much more expensive last-minute ticket at the airport.

(The customer support person also managed to spell my name wrong when I contacted them).

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