
Microsoft adding support for custom '+' email addresses in Office 365 - crones
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-adds-support-for-custom-email-addresses-in-office-365/
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Hnrobert42
Now if only websites will stop rejecting plus-addressed email addresses as
invalid. The most frequent offenders are mom & pop websites that you just
_know_ are going to get breached.

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amf12
You can also use this with a "." (email.spam@gmail.com) in Gmail.

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inanutshellus
Periods are ignored in gmail and anything after a + is also ignored, so all of
these will go to the same mailbox:

    
    
       johndoe@gmail.com
       john.doe@gmail.com
       j.o.h.n.d.o.e@gmail.com
       johndoe+spam@gmail.com
       john....doe+spam@gmail.com
    

but johndoe.spam@gmail.com wouldn't go to the same mailbox.

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pi-err
john...doe@gmail.com doesn’t seem to work though. I don’t think Gmail takes
multiple dots.

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chrismorgan
Not just Gmail, that’s a syntactically invalid email address. See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Local-
part](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Local-part) for details.

But sure, you could have `(my name is)john."..".doe+spam(...)@gmail.com` if
you wanted to. Syntactically valid! The parenthesised bits would be stripped
out before sending, and I have no idea whether Gmail would be willing to
accept the quoted dots bit.

~~~
inanutshellus
Haha, I debated about throwing in the multi-dot address. Bummed that it was a
bad example. :(

As for parens, I recollect the spec lets you nest your parens and quotes! It's
insane. e.g. `f(oo."(bar."baz")."quux)@example.com` is valid in the spec.

I wrote an Oracle regex to parse for valid email addresses and I went against
the spec rather than what is what's practically used. It was an insane thing.

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ahalam
FastMail had some of the cleverest ideas for plus addressing.
username+tag@fastmail.fm could be given away as tag@username.fastmail.fm

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jph00
I wrote that! I'm glad you like it. :)

It's been nearly 20 years since I added that feature. I assumed at the time
everyone would do it when they saw how handy it is. For some reason that
didn't happen...

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mynegation
I used it, Jeremy. Since then I transitioned to sitename@mydomain.email but I
still have quite a bit of legacy sitename@myusername.fastmail.fm

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cm2187
It reminds me a gag from the last season of What we do in the shadow. A
character puts a toothpick on his lip and suddenly none of the other
characters recognise him.

Like if spammers and hackers were not aware of the + notation, and like if it
wasn’t trivial to extract the underlying email address by removing anything
after the +...

Unless you have an alias that completely obfuscate the underlying email, I
just don’t see the point.

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scarface74
I agree. But there are other corner cases where that would be helpful. I’ve
worked at a lot of software as a service companies where your email address
has to be unique per client for a multi tenant system.

We would create different users for different roles. I would love to be able
to use one email address distinguished with a tag.

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jasonv
I moved all my public emails from first@last.something to
first.last@wellknownmailprovider

and then spent a lot of time changing my email address in accounts that I've
had a really long time.

Shocked at how badly that went, actually. For certain service providers, I
couldn't change my email address and was encouraged to open a new account,
which would've meant losing certain records in the old accounts. I couldn't
consolidate.

And companies that have different email addresses for their accounts and their
mailing lists -- not helpful.

And finally, companies that disable the "update your email address" link in
footer of popular email list services, so your only option is to unsubscribe
-- good going (not).

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DenseComet
What was your reasoning behind moving your emails to a public email provider
instead of an email with a domain you seemed to control?

I've been trying to move in the other direction and its been exactly as much
of a pain as you've mentioned.

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jasonv
There's a long story here, but here's the short take:

Most of my email accounts are public email provider mapped to domains. But
anytime I sign-up for something that's not tied only to one of my work
endeavors, I use the non-mapped address. So, newsletters, sign-ups, Amazon
account, etc. I don't use any mapped domains for those things, as those kind
of come-and-go.

I segregate my personal email and my business emails from the @public-email-
provider address, which I want to keep away from my other activities. It also
puts all those mailing list emails, legal acknowledgements, etc., in one place
as much as possible. I can filter and manage those in one place.

I also don't have a strong sense of personal ownership of that stuff. It's
like a PO Box, not my house address. I don't check that account for human-
initiated communication. That's my personal address (which gets almost zero
traffic these days) and my work/business email addresses.

I have a strong aversion to the company behind public email provider. But I
set a calendar reminder for a year out so I don't think about it much until
then. I have some endeavors that will let me close up various business
activities and centralize to one. If/when that's solid, I'll probably
consolidate all my income-oriented business accounts and services [and
probably somewhere else], but keep the public... as it's just a PO Box.

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forgotmypw17
I understand the appeal of this feature for sorting, but it seems ineffective
for things like "figure out who sold my email to the spammers" because
everyone knows about it and it's elementary to just trim off everything after
the plus sign.

Unless you do some kind of verification and filter email sent to addresses
without a valid suffix?

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giomasce
Since I have my own domain, I receive all emails addressed at
whatever@domain.com. Of course, different values of "whatever" end up in
different directories, and should one of those display an insufficient SNR, it
would go straight to /dev/null. This way the "proper" address, i.e., the one
that goes to the actual inbox, is not easy to extract.

The hard part is social acceptance. This morning the Whirpool technician was
very puzzled by me giving him whirpool@domain.tld as my email, although he
accepted my explanations in the end. (I might use more opaque identifiers, but
then I would forget about what is what, so for the moment I am trying to stick
with this scheme, until it becomes too difficult)

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simpss
The social acceptance part is truly hard. I recently received a BS trademark
cease & desist because i was using the company name in the e-mail address I
provided them & was using to communicate with them.

Personally, i've just replaced the recipient_delimiter default value(+) with
"." as that is basically impossible to strip out. Ex,
firstname.COMPANY@example.net

I do get a lot of weird looks when handing the addresses out in person, but a
quick explanation usually works. I just tell them, that if I start receiving
spam from one one the addresses, I can just block it and be done with it. They
sometimes counter with "but we won't spam you" and I acknowledge that with
"but not everyone is so nice as you" or something like that.

ps: you can use multiple delimiters, so grouping is possible with
firstname.bills.COMPANY@example.net

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EvanAnderson
I use the "companyname" part of "companyname@mydomain.tld" to express (often
very profane) editorial views about the company when their site won't let me
sign-up with "companyname@mydomain.tdl". I'm sure nobody ever sees it, but it
makes me feel better.

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inanutshellus
The process for sending email /from/ a + address is tricky.

First -- in GMail at least -- you have to explicitly set up a + account as
being in your list of "from" accounts and then you have to remember to use it
every time you reply!

Not to mention forgetting the email I gave them when resetting passwords
sucks, too. "Was that foo+hn or foo+ycombinator or foo+ycombinator.com or
foo+hackernews or... hm... uhhh..." (You need a centralized password manager,
in other words.)

I've had several issues where I've replied and sending from the base-address
means the conversation goes awry ("We don't recognize this email address"), or
at best I still expose the base address because I only remember to reply using
the laboriously-created-from-plus address about a fourth of the time.

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donmcronald
You can't even send from a normal alias in Office 365, so I'd be shocked if
you'll be able to send from these '+' aliases.

~~~
inanutshellus
Wow, that sucks.

I honestly don't see how that would work. Like, how would you unsubscribe to a
mailing list? Most these days let you click a link rather than reply with
"unsubscribe" but still...

I've had multiple occasions where contact /to/ a business needed to come from
the email address I used to sign up with their service (automatic correlation
to users I guess).

One particular exchange was particularly painful. Every email I sent was, I
assume, routed to a new customer queue. Every email that I sent from my non-+
alias was delayed by days and then dealt with by an unhelpful "we don't
recognize this email address".

It was very painful and it was all because I used a + alias as my supplied
email address but kept forgetting to use it as my 'from' address.

Had I not had the ability to set it as my 'from' I'd probably have stopped
using + aliases entirely.

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throw0101a
Finally.

This has only been allowed since RFC 822 (1982). Is there any reason why
Microsoft did not support this from the beginning (of Exchange)?

~~~
randunel
I've been using "Microsoft 365" since 2012, outlook w/ a custom domain and all
the grandfathered features. The +tag has always been supported, and I can't
really tell what the difference between "Office 365" and "Microsoft 365" is,
since the latter appears to include the former, if not identical.

~~~
scohesc
Microsoft recently renamed a majority of their products yet again because if
it wasn't confusing enough already, it's even more confusing now!

"Microsoft 365" now includes all of Windows 10, Office 365 (Office on PC) and
Azure. This is more geared towards the home market.

Then, there's "Office 365 for Business" which as the name implies is more for
business/corporate customers.

It looks like your custom domain is using the old Outlook.com/Hotmail
architecture, which already supported +<tags> in email addresses - while
Microsoft's corporate offering (running on a cloud based Exchange Server)
still doesn't, and they're pushing support for it out later this year.

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
I think if you have the means, you should always get a custom domain for your
email address. Your email address is the key to your online identity. You
should own it, and not lease it from someone else.

And it is not like you have to manage your own email servers. You can use
services like fastmail or any number of email providers to receive email on
your own domain. You also have the ability to change your implementation
without changing your address. You can decide to host it yourself, or go to
another provider without having to tell all your contacts that you are
changing your email.

It becomes trivial to actually give out email addresses that are customized
for the service. Instead of me+service@hotmail.com you can give out
service@mydomain.com.

In my opinion, the money you spend for your own domain for email, is well
worth it.

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hadcomplained
I wonder why there are no email providers that offer an infinite number of
aliases that cannot be associated with the primary address. Simply offering
any aliases would soon fill out easy-to-remember addresses, but can't email
providers offer a feature to add a randomly-generated address such as
098f6bcd4621d373cade4e832627b4f6@email.provider? This way, users can use a
different email address on a different web service when registration, which
would reveal no information about the user and drastically improve users'
privacy. In addition, it is easy to track down which web service is at fault
in the event of receiving spams via sold user data.

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ahnberg
Maybe they will get around to fixing their In-Reply-To header removal madness
one of these decades too, would be something!

Tired of Microsoft users subscribed to mailinglists constantly breaking
threading.

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tmaly
I found out this was a bad idea to use when I used it with gmail to signup for
AirBnB. I had forgotten that I used it.

I created a new account without it, but I could not bring over my past
reviews.

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etaioinshrdlu
I had to normalize email addresses in my web service by removing "+..."
because of spammy users. My god, spammers are often so obvious...

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altreality2050
They had to. This was the only reason why people would refuse to migrate from
GSuite to Office365.

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techntoke
I don't think it is the only reason. Labels in Gmail are still really nice.
Microsoft Outlook rules will often duplicate messages and smart folders using
search filters don't work between browser and email client. Using IMAP they
are simply virtual directories like they should be.

Microsoft Calendar is also pretty bad too. Like in a large organization you'll
often have people leave the company. When you delete a series in Outlook with
multiple people it tries removing the history for everyone which is important
dates. There are a lot of nuances that would prevent me from ever switching to
Office. Even OneDrive is tied to SharePoint and it is way too easy to break.

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CodesInChaos
You could use such addresses already, but had to configure an address regex
for each user.

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curiousgal
They should just fix searching in Outlook web instead.

~~~
m0xte
LMAO so true. The search is beyond dire. Not much better on the desktop
either.

