On 4/9/2022 12:26 PM, Tara Natanson via mailop wrote:
Biggest problem I'm having is that no one states in their advertising
or FAQs if they support "+" addressing
There are innocent reasons to desire that "+" feature...
...and there are nefarious reasons for desiring it.
Innocent reasons include wanting to be able to track who shared your
address with 3rd parties and/or being able to create rules to sort your
email replies into folders, etc.
The main nefarious reason is someone wanting to send marketing messages
(OFTEN spamming!) from a large mail hosting service mailbox - and then
the "+" feature (used in either the SMTP envelope FROM or in a
"Reply-To" header) greatly improves the ability to track bounces and
unsubscribes and other abuse - often with a goal of getting rid of the
worst complainers, but not actually reducing the spamming in any
significant way. Using such a mail hosting service for spamming enables
a spammer to benefit from that services' good reputation and "too big to
block" size - whereas such a spammer trying to create their own isolated
mail server - doesn't have that benefit and is at a great disadvantage
when little-to-none of their outbound messages are actually desired and
have proper permissions.
These types mailboxes for personal domains, even if under a "business"
plan, are not intended to replace the services of an ESP, or to
facilitate spamming - and sadly - for every 1 example of an innocent
person wanting this feature for innocent reasons - there's likely 100+
spammers wanting that feature to help facilitate spamming. For this
reason, it's possible that some of these services you mentioned DO have
that feature, but chose to stop mentioning it in order to hopefully not
attract the bad guys to their services!
When a service attracts a disproportionately larger amount of spammers
to their mail hosting platform - it's typical for all the innocent users
of that platform to have their deliverability suffer - even when shared
sending-IPs are NOT listed on any major DNSBLs. And the work needed to
stop that only increases the overhead costs of the service, which
increases prices. So for multiple reasons, this isn't a victimless type
of abuse.
I'm NOT claiming that YOU are trying to use this for spamming - just
trying to raise awareness of some of the issues surrounding this feature
and why some either don't offer it - or don't mention having it, even if
it's technically offered.
-- Rob McEwen, invaluement
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