8 thoughts on “Postal rates go up, but not enough”

1. My problem with the post office’s new regulations is that they’re passing on the buck and creating far too much hassle for the end user. As Jason Kottke opined:

   The new postal price restrictions on thickness and whether the envelope is “flat-machinable” or not seem like the USPS passing along internal problems to their customers, the same crappy stuff that banks and the airlines do. Keep the process simple…we don’t care about your technology can and can’t do. Figure it out.

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2. I didn’t know about that ‘+’ sign on gmail. I think i’m going to start using that a lot more.

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3. The + is a cool trick. Useful and I will have to research how you can setup a mail server to do that. I believe it is a trick from long ago, but lesser known. I could be wrong.

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4. The + sign is actually supposed to be the standard email behavior. In fact, most mail servers do it by default, whether the people that use them know it or not. You can easily test whether yours works by sending an email to youraccount+test@yourdomain.com.

   That said, some online forms won’t recognize the + as being a part of a valid email address; and even when you can use it, it’s easy to trim out via regular expressions, so companies can still sell you out without you knowing (unless you use amazon@yourdomain.com like you originally suggested, but that’s definitely more involved).

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5. “If you own a domain name, you can use ebay@yourdomain.com for eBay, amazon@yourdomain.com for Amazon, etc. They all get delivered to the same place, but then when you receive junk mail you can tell who sold you out.”

   Not really. Spammers can simply generate email addresses. For the Hotmail.com domain, there is no need to get someone to tell me an email address there, I can guess that john@hotmail.com is going to exist. Unfortunately, tracking who “sold you out” isn’t as simple as you make it sound.

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6. Jordy, nice email address! (You too, Shaun.)

   Jason, tracking who “sold you out” IS this simple if your email address isn’t easy to guess, like firstname@hotmail.com. But sure, there’s much more to avoiding spam.

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7. @Jason, nice way to pull out some pessimism. I guess it is a bad day for all john@hotmail.com‘s of the world. You missed the point of the example.

   Mr. Miller, thanks for tip on the “+”. I will try that from now on.

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8. No pessimism – just the facts. Sure, I used a simple example, which you can pick apart if you like. But unless you are truly random with your email address, like DW56Co8zmZ9G@Hotmail.com, there are still many ways and means of obtaining your email address. Spammers are a lot smarter than you are giving them credit for (or shall I say, the people that write the software that uses some pretty good heuristics to generate email addresses are smart).

   Believe whatever you want.

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