Difference between revisions of "Wikicliki:Community Portal"
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Here is where I put draft articles up. | Here is where I put draft articles up. | ||
| − | == Gmail | + | == Gmail separator hack == |
One little known fact is that although Gmail allows you sign up with one fullstop in your email (and in fact encourages it by prompting you with possible options with fullstops as the separator), it actually ignores the dot when sending and receiving mail. | One little known fact is that although Gmail allows you sign up with one fullstop in your email (and in fact encourages it by prompting you with possible options with fullstops as the separator), it actually ignores the dot when sending and receiving mail. | ||
Revision as of 12:57, 16 September 2008
Here is where I put draft articles up.
Gmail separator hack
One little known fact is that although Gmail allows you sign up with one fullstop in your email (and in fact encourages it by prompting you with possible options with fullstops as the separator), it actually ignores the dot when sending and receiving mail.
Thus, if you had sent an email to user.name@gmail.com, it would be no different from sending emails to username@gmail.com or u.s.e.r.na.me@gmail.com, or any permutation of the username littered with (or devoid of) fullstops.
The possible usefulness of this lies with spam detection; you tag the email address with a unique mark (in this case, the extra separator) and then you could conceivably trace your spam back to the point where you submitted your tag. The plus separator is technically an acceptable character in the local address (the part of the email before the "@" symbol) under standard Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, but some web forms will intentionally reject addresses with plus symbols for "security reasons" (although there has been widespread use of the plus separator to filter tagged mail into mailboxes) even though its accepted by RFC2821 and RFC2822.
The fullstop is more ubiquitous as it is generally allowed, except in the case of two dots next to each other or a dot at the beginning or end of the local part. So it MIGHT just be a better way to filter your mail than using the plus symbol. That is if you actually bother...
