A way we could potentially get around the fact that many web forms prevent plus signs in email addresses
Many of you are likely already familiar with the immensely useful feature of including plus signs (+) in Gmail addresses, such as the following:
askthecssguy+mileycyrusfanclub@gmail.com
This would allow me to sign up for account at another web site, and be able to track spam or apply filters based on everything after the plus sign.
The problem is that many web sites that ask for email addresses will reject addresses that contain a plus sign. To get around this, we could do one of two things:
- Contact every web site owner whose site doesn't allow plus signs, and convince them to change their form validation.
- Get Gmail to recognize a special string of characters as the same as '+'.
I'd love to see Gmail implement a feature where a specially string of characters would serve the same purpose as '+'. That string would be made up of commonly accepted characters, like [a-z] and [0-9], but their special combination would trigger the Gmail application to treat it like a plus sign.
For example, let's say Gmail enabled this for the following string of characters: zzzplussignzzz. So I would sign up for the Miley Cyrus fan club using the following address:
askthecssguyzzzplussignzzzmileycyrusfanclub@gmail.com
I chose 'zzzplussignzzz' because it is unlikely to be used in a legitimate email address, and it would be easy to protect any new Gmail signups from using that string, perhaps by using the 'Sorry, that's already taken' indicator in case someone attempts to do so.
Comments (10)
Marco Philipeit said:
Very interesting since I didn't know that GMail is offering such a feature.
But I've some scruples about the lenght of the E-Mail-Address. askthecssguyzzzplussignzzzmileycyrusfanclub@gmail.com is over 50 characters long which could be too long for some optimized databases. And even think about googlemail.com!
However the number of these databases probabely is lower than websites blocking the + character in E-Mail-Addresses.
# November 18, 2009 6:50 AM
Jennifer C said:
I am unfamiliar with this feature! Where did you first see it? This is the first I have even heard of it.
# November 18, 2009 8:27 AM
CSS Guy said:
@Marco
Yes, length is a problem for my example. But I'm confident there could be a much shorter string that would be just as unlikely to be used in normal email addressess. Maybe a mix of numbers/letters such as '6t6t6'.
@Jennifer C
I can't remember where I first heard of using the '+'. There are a few sites that talk about it. A quick google reveals that this is called sub-addressing.
# November 18, 2009 9:40 AM
Niels Bom said:
Excellent idea!
Conceptually I agree that webforms should just accept the + sign. But practically Google could help.
A third option could be that you subscribe with your own domain-name so myname_zzzpluszzz_mileycyrusfanclub@mydomain.com and then "rewrite" the _zzzpluszzz_ to a + sign yourself before forwarding to Gmail.
Another option, which I use with my own domain is using mileycyrusfanclub@example.com with a catchall to my Gmail account and then filter out all emails to mileycyrusfanclub@example.com in my Gmail.
# November 18, 2009 1:41 PM
CSS Guy said:
@Niels
Nice workaround for those that use their own domain for email. Thanks for posting - that's one idea I'll likely use in the future.
# November 18, 2009 4:44 PM
Eric said:
I don't like this idea. Using a specific punctuation mark that is already not permitted in "actual" gmail usernames (the plus sign) was simple (ish). Now if you want something that will sneak by all the stupid form validators that don't use an accurate pattern to match RFC compliant email addresses, you have to find a string that matches these criteria:
Or, an even worse option:
The second one is obviously fraught with problems and I see no (simple) way to make it work. It breaks parsing of the address by gmail, makes signups very complex computationally, etc.
On the other hand, the first is more feasible but is still not good. I doubt that there is any substring shorter than 5 characters (and probably longer than that) that doesn't exist in any current gmail username. I doubt even more that whatever could be found would make any sense, nevermind in all languages.
As cool an idea as this is, it won't work as far as I can see. Niels may have the best workaround, but it's not even a solution within gmail. You have to run your own mailserver to get it to work.
# November 18, 2009 7:32 PM
me said:
With gmail you have an other option too, way simpler than what Niels suggested. Put a dot somewhere in your email address, and you can filter on that too.
Example: ask.thecssguy@gmail.com
# November 19, 2009 7:33 AM
CSS Guy said:
@me (that isn't really me):
Of course! Thanks! I knew I could use a dot, but never thought about using filters based on the dot's position. I did a test, and found I could even use multiple dots, such as as.kthe.css.g.uy@gmail.com, which greatly increases the number of combinations I can use. I'm learning some good tricks this week.
The downside of this (vs plus sign) is that I can't use memorable sub-addressing names, such as the "mileycyrusfanclub" bit. That's not so bad if I'm just doing spam filtering... but I'm thinking about the times others are encouraged to use sub-addressing when entering a contest or something. Of course, in those instances, the site owner hosting the contest would know to allow plus signs, and could also encourage a subject line, so this isn't a real-life downside at all.
I appreciate the enlightenment on the dot... will definitely use that for the time being whenever proper sub-addressing doesn't work.
# November 19, 2009 8:56 AM
kosmar said:
Unlikely, but id love to see this happen. Gmail Team should read this. (Besides i would even more like that sites would support OpenID though.)
# November 26, 2009 1:43 PM
love games said:
The downside of this (vs plus sign) is that I can't use memorable sub-addressing names, such as the "mileycyrusfanclub" bit. That's not so bad if I'm just doing spam filtering... but I'm thinking about the times others are encouraged to use sub-addressing when entering a contest or something. Of course, in those instances, the site owner hosting the contest would know to allow plus signs, and could also encourage a subject line, so this isn't a real-life downside at all.
# February 8, 2010 8:34 AM