Recently when my Yahoo Mail account came up for renewal, I looked at Google's plus-addressing. I like plus addressing, but for me it fails in two areas:
- you use your account name before the plus part (ie accountname+plus@gmail)
- not all sites accept email addresses with a plus in them
AddressGuard uses a self-selected, unrelated word for the part before the plus, and then you append a -disposable after (ie selfselected-disposable@yahoo.com). You must manually create every disposable AddressGuard email address, and selfselected@yahoo.com doesn't exist. This makes it much harder (impossible?) for sites to circumvent this filtering and/or associate the disposable address with the receiving account. With plus-addressing, any site could simply drop the +plus part and have the email match different filters and potentially be delivered. Over time you could filter the cruft based on From: addresses, but that's a hassle
plus in email address considered invalid
I'm really surprised by the number of big name sites out there that see an email address with a + in it as invalid. This is really disappointing, and it does make plus-addressing much less appealing.
what I did
To more closely match the functionality of AddressGuard, I setup two google accounts. The first is where I send all my emails. This account is created with a generic word not associated with me. To keep with the example above, I'll use accountname@gmail.com. In this account, I setup a filter to forward everything back to my second account, which is my real gmail account. For illustration, I'll call that realaccount@gmail.
If I want to block some incoming mail, I do that at the accountmail level. I do all my other filtering at the realaccount level. This does a pretty fair job of emulating AddressGuard, and it's free.
There isn't much I can do to solve the second problem. Everytime I run into a site that doesn't support plus-addressing, I send a note into their support email address. Over time I imagine there will be more support for it.
In the end I've renewed my yahoo account for another year to give me time to completely migrate to gmail.
