One of the challenges on the web at the moment is that many sites want you to register a “free” userid just to do the most mundane thing (such as downloading a file, viewing a picture, etc). While I don’t have a problem with that requirement in general, I am often quite sceptical about what they plan to do with my userid.
There is a common technique that many people use where they create a site-specific version of their email address (I believed it is often called “plussed email addressing”). For example, let’s say that my actual address is edwardaux@mydomain.com and I wanted to signup to flickr, I could
create an email address called edwardaux-flickr@mydomain.com and use that (and tell my mail server to forward all email to that address to my real edwardaux@mydomain.com address). The nice thing about this is that if flickr is naughty (not that I am suggesting they are) and sells/gives my email address to spammers, I can immediately determine that by looking at who the email was addressed to.
The problem with this approach is that I have to go into my mail server ahead of time and manually create each site-specific email address. That is a bit of a hassle, and I am sure that I can get away with a simpler approach.
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Posted by edwardaux 