On Fri, Feb 20, 2015 at 11:45 PM, MZMcBride z@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@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