Looping through the gmail dot trick

[Neil Hodgson]

Martin Marcher:

> are you saying that when i have 2 gmail addresses
> 
> "foo.bar at gmail.com" and
> "foobar at gmail.com"
> 
> they are actually treated the same? That is plain wrong and would break a
> lot of mail addresses as I have 2 that follow just this pattern and they
> are delivered correctly!

    This is a feature of some mail services such as Gmail, not of email 
addresses generically. One use is to provide a set of addresses given 
one base address. '+' works as well as '.' so when I sign up to service 
monty I give them the address nyamatongwe+monty at gmail.com. Then when I 
receive spam at nyamatongwe+monty, I know who to blame and what to block.

    Neil