When a site rejects email
"sub-addressing"
Rob
Pegoraro, Special for USA TODAY8:29 a.m. EST November 1, 2015
Q. I tried to sign up at a site
using the plus-sign trick to create a custom e-mail address, but the sign-in
page rejected me. What’s going on there?
A. The reader who raised this issue was trying to use a
tip I shared here last July -- creating a
bonus e-mail address by adding a plus sign and the characters of your choice to
the username part of your e-mail address.
Google’s Gmail and such competitors as
Microsoft’s Outlook.com allow
this “sub-addressing” option. It’s a handy way
to generate a new e-mail address--to register a second account at a site, to
ease filtering messages from that company, or to track which firms sold your
address to third parties--without changing any settings in your mail account or
having to look anywhere for new messages but your usual inbox
This practice may also reduce the
amount of spam you get, although at least some spammers know to strip out the
plus sign and everything after it. And it’s not against the rules of the
Internet, such as they exist: There’s an entire specification
documenting the finer points of sub-addressing.
But sub-addressing won’t work if a
site rejects a “plus-ed” e-mail address as invalid.
The two biggest sites to present
this obstacle to my reader were TransUnion’s
credit-report site and Experian’s ProtectMyID.com identity-theft-prevention
site.
(Yes, Experian is the company that
recently lost the records of 15 million T-Mobile customers to a
hacker. The irony of that firm hindering customers from cloaking
their e-mail addresses is duly noted.)
“TransUnion does not accept
special characters in e-mail addresses,” a spokesman said. “Our system requires
an e-mail format that is compatible with all e-mail services.”
But the core
Internet specification for e-mail doesn’t ban plus signs in
usernames or other special characters. This problem is only about TransUnion’s
mail system; if it can’t handle usernames that aren’t just letters and numbers,
the company might want to shop around for something more tolerant.
Experian had a more helpful
response.
“We are aware of the issue and
addressing it,” ProtectMyID PR manager Sandra Bernardo e-mailed Thursday.
“These types of email addresses should be accepted by early next week.”
It’s unclear how many other sites
have this hangup, although it’s not hard to finddiscussions in which people complain about it without
naming the offending Web properties.
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