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> Gmail supports the + thing, but that's non-standard

Plusaddressing is valid and has been since 1982[1]. It's part of RFC822 and the subsequent RFC2822.

The fact that many websites do not allow + in an email address during validation is a common programming mistake and the sign of an undertrained engineer.

[1] https://people.cs.rutgers.edu/~watrous/plus-signs-in-email-a...



> The fact that many websites do not allow + in an email address during validation is a common programming mistake and the sign of an undertrained engineer.

Or just sanity.

I am totally onboard (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31797121#31822961) with having compliant parsers (or just not using them)

But the RFC from what I can recall is _wild_. I can't find the part so maybe I am mixing something else up, but I believe you can embed comments into an email address.

All I am saying is that the possible scope of valid email addresses is likely so large, trying to write a parser for them is a sign of an underexperienced team rather than not having one at all.


Sorry, I should have been clearer. Gmail will place messages for user@gmail.com and user+foo@gmail.com in the same mailbox. The grandparent comment talks about normalizing the address by removing stuff after the +. This sort of deduplicates the addresses. Other platforms may have distinct mailboxes for user and user+foo, so you can't strip it on those platforms. The mapping of user+foo to user is non-standard.

There won't be a general approach to deduplicating addresses that map to the same mailbox as the mapping rules aren't always public. But for Gmail, the rule is public, so a best effort deduplication could strip the +.




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