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I've read that I should use email subaddressing when registering for web sites. For example, if my email address is user@domain.com, then, when registering for somesite.com, I should use the email address user+somesite@domain.com.

How effective is this at controlling annoying emails from somesite.com (or, in the extreme, outright spam)? What is to prevent somesite.com from stripping the +somesite tag and sending directly to user@domain.com? Is email subaddressing something that I should bother to use, or are the benefits limited?

Henry
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Nothing except volume and predictability.

They certainly can do it, and they can automate that process, but spam distribution is a volume business, so they are interested in getting a list of as many email addresses as possible, but they are not likely to parse individual addresses to look for your 'sub-addressing'. if a large percentage of users used this system, then spammers would definitely do as you suggest, but as it stands currently, just the inconvenience of having dozens of accounts to manage makes the practice unpopular, and thus rare. the spammers have very little incentive to attempt to detect and parse out the root email address.

I wouldn't bother with accounts for each service I use, but I do use different accounts for different kinds of recipients.

Frank Thomas
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