where does +detail come from?

[Jeff Macdonald]

On Thu, 2004-03-25 at 13:57, Kevin D. Clark wrote:

> 1: I wouldn't be surprised if spammers strip out "+detail" from their
>    list of email addresses, either to be more annoying or else to
>    increase the size of their "unique email list".
> 

I know of at least one marketing company that doesn't touch addresses.
Perhaps other's do. As indicated earlier you can't count on a MTA or MDA
to treat the +detail as something special. It can actually be part of a
real email address.

> 2: If you're relying upon this technique to filter out future spam,
>    you're probably going to be disappointed.  If "jeff at palm@blah" gets
>    sold to a spammer, you can be sure that jeff at blah is going to start
>    getting spam, and you won't know who sold your address.
> 

Perhaps. However I've seen my jeff+usenet for Usenet postings come as
just usenet. I'm guessing the regex that was used to produce that
address was something like:

/[a-zA-z0-9.]+@[a-zA-z0-9.]+/	# not tested - but intent should be clear

Actually, there is no reason why I couldn't change the + to a dot and
have sendmail use that instead..... hmmm..... (I run my own MTA).


> Full disclosure:  I have a friend who started a business
> (http://www.emailias.com/) that provides a service (for a fee) that
> provides email addresses that get around this problem.
> 

Full disclosure: I work for a Direct Marketing company (a ESP).