The Brainwrecked Tech

Plus (or minus, depends on the host) addressing can be a wonderful tool. In this automated world, computers don’t care how email addresses are formed, just whether or not the email address is valid. Actually, scratch that, they don’t care about that either — they’ll be more than happy to return error messages back to you if the address is somehow invalid.

But anyways, one of the things I decided to do when I got my Gmail account was to use plus-addressing to track down companies who were more than willing to hand out my email address to outside companies. Don’t want to accept the plus address? Too bad, you get the Hotmail account which will be shut down in a matter of days due to inactivity — have fun spamming that. Won’t stop spamming an account that’s bouncing messages back to you? Hope Microsoft bans your domain.

All you have to do is use your email username followed by either a plus sign (Runbox, Gmail, FastMail) or a minus sign (Runbox, Yahoo! Mail) followed by some identifying tag. So, if your email address is joesixpack@gmail.com, you can give the bank something like joesixpack+mybank@gmail.com to not only to sort out email from your bank, but to track who your bank gives out your email address to.

Let’s see how this works in the real world:

Oh my, oh my! Looks like Pizza Hut thinks it’s OK to give out my email address to third-party marketing firms. You know how I fixed that, right?

Pizza Hut can send me offers for free pizza all they want now — I don’t care and I won’t be returning any time soon.