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Comment by mraison | Hacker News Reader

I wasn't aware of the bunch of services that provide temporary email addresses. Something I've been doing with my gmail address is to put johndoe+thenameofthesite@gmail.com instead of just johndoe@gmail.com. It's nice that Gmail gives you such a wide range of addresses that automatically point to your regular mailbox. It's clearly not ideal (doesn't preserve the privacy of my normal email address), but it's super easy to do and in most cases it allows me to filter out unwanted emails, trace which advertiser got my email address from which service, etc. Now of course if services start implementing the removal of the +* part from the email address then this doesn't work anymore. But for now I think they don't really care.

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I have a johndoe.public@gmail.com email address that forwards everything to johndoe@gmail.com. I do the same trick you do, but I use johndoe.public+sitename@gmail.com instead.

I sometimes use mailinator too.

and how easy is for spammers to remove the "+sitename" from email address?

I'm embarrassed to say that it wasn't until I'd been using this technique for multiple years that this occurred to me. I've kept doing it out of inertia ever since.

I'd say "it works if you make sure that no legitimate mail will lack a +", but some sites fail horribly when there's a + in your address. (I once got stuck in a situation where the "new account" form on a site accepted the + version, but their login form (based on email address) didn't.)

I will forever be subscribed to the Bowery Presents newsletter because Ticketmaster's unsubscribe form doesn't allow +s in email addresses.

I just do a quick whois look up and CC the offending mail to both the legal department and the abuse email of said company automatically.

It may be beyond your level of interest to try, but I've often experienced that sites who put dumb validation rules in the browser will therefore omit the validation on the server. Thus, you're one well crafted curl request away from unsubscription bliss. Chrome will also give you some help in that its network request list in the developer tools has a "copy as curl" in the right-click menu.

Also, a LOT of these services just reject any '+' in the email addresses.

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