Added security with email address tags

2 points by jackistall 14 years ago | 1 comment

Pretend your email address gets compromised from Gawker, and the hacker starts to use it on other popular platforms. You can use different passwords to help limit the risk of the hacker accessing your other accounts.

One added security measure is to use address tags that are accepted by email services like Gmail and Yahoo. Depending on what email service you use, you can use a +, -, or = after the local part of your email address to then add an email address tag. This will allow you to have a different email on record with various organizations, while still receiving notifications to the same address.

Here are some examples for some of our favorite companies: Gawker:yourname+gawker@gmail.com Sony: yourname+ps3@gmail.com Email promotions: yourname+disneyemail@gmail.com Expedia: yourname+expedia@gmail.com

Read more about email address tags. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Address_tags

arscan 14 years ago |

These are nice, but occasionally i find that overzealous validation scripts on websites don't allow you to put these in. An alternative, if you use gmail, is to add in some periods to your email address, since they are ignored on gmails side.

So johnsmith@gmail.com may be your normal email address, john.smith@gmail.com you submit to site #1, john..smith@gmail.com you submit to site #2, john...smith@gmail.com you submit to site #3. They all get delivered to johnsmith@gmail.com. Not at all scalable, unless you write some scripts to encode/decode meaningful info into those patterns.