On Fri, Feb 20, 2015 at 11:45 PM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
Hi.
Brion Vibber wrote:
I personally have a bunch of test accounts that
probably have the same
email, and I'm sure some folks have bots and other things set up
similarly. Note that many email providers including Gmail allow email
aliases with "+" and something else after your mailbox name, such as
'johndoe+testing99 at wikimedia.org'; I've used this in the past to have
separate accounts on one email for Apple and other providers as well.
It's probably difficult to estimate, but I wonder what percentage of users
are currently using a mail provider that supports this type of behavior.
On the one hand, I thought Gmail/Google Apps was alone in supporting
account+something(a)example.com functionality, but on the other hand, nearly
everybody seems to be using Gmail/Google Apps these days.
RFC 5321 says that interpretation and validation of the local part of
an email address is left entirely to the receiving host [0] which
makes verifying which hosts support various "subaddressing" methods
[1] difficult. As mentioned in [[en:Email address]] [2] however there
are quite a few large mail services and common mail transfer agent
packages support some type of subaddressing or tagging although with
various syntax variations.
[0]:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321#section-2.3.11
[1]:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5233
[2]:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Address_tags
Bryan
--
Bryan Davis Wikimedia Foundation <bd808(a)wikimedia.org>
[[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] Sr Software Engineer Boise, ID USA
irc: bd808 v:415.839.6885 x6855