[LINK] Why www.etc?

[Scott Howard]

On 12/7/07, Paul Brooks <pbrooks-link at layer10.com.au> wrote:
>
> The '+' is a fairly recent development used only within the Cpanel
> webhosting system as far as I know.


"Recent" is obviously a fairly relative term, but the concept of using + in
addresses has been around for at least 10 years, although it wasn't
necessarily natively supported in most MTAs at that stage (It's only the
receiving MTA that needs to support it - not the sender or anyone in the
middle).  Sendmail needed 1 or 2 extra config lines to support it.

It's used far more extensively than cpanel, and is supported by most MTAs,
including most webmail services.

For years I have been using different addresses within my own domain to
differentiate where mail has come from, and in at least two cases have been
able to confirm legitimate (?) companies selling addresses  (or in one case,
if you believe them, "the addresses were stolen when our system went in for
repair").

The problem with this approach is that I now receive up to about 20 copies
of each spam message which is sent, as the spammers have managed to get
their hands on multiple of the address - mainly those that ended up on
websites/usenet/etc.  I'm not sure if the same happens with + addresses, but
between that and spammers simply removing everything after a + I'm not sure
if they are really that much use...


  Scott.