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I think you have identified better solutions than the current ones. What is more interesting is that many underlying processes already exist, for example any gmail address can be "customized" by adding "+<string>" to the end, Google ignores the +string and delivers it anyway. You can then filter on email sent to the +string value. Not everyone however accepts an email with + in the name part. Paypal has the ability to send you out to Paypal to authorize a payment, the vendor never sees your banking details. Their API works well and could be adopted by any bank if they chose. At Blekko we separated queries from IP addresses, from userid (if they were logged in). You could do it, still get ranking training data from it, and be completely unable to turn over "the last week of searches from this IP" to federal agencies. That was driven by the CTO.

So at the end of the day there is a lot of things which make data toxic easily avoidable, and it takes people at the company willing to invest in making the data "non-toxic" and to some extent non-useful to people outside the company.




> Not everyone however accepts an email with + in the name part.

It's beyond this. MOST email address forms won't accept a '+'. I had to change the extension character to '_' on my server because it's the only non-alphabetic character that everybody seems to accept.


FastMail has an option to use subdomain addressing[0]. Instead of user+string@example.com, it can be string@user.example.com.

[0] https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/addressing.html


That is an excellent solution as well. Qmail was pre-configured to work with '-' in the user string. But the use of subdomains would work as long as you could meet things like the Google DKIM checks.


Paypal is not a solution. They send my paypal email address to every merchant which is no different from the POV of fraud then sending any other identifying info. That's one thing I liked about Google Checkout, they had the option to send a one time email address.


A PayPal email address, as opposed to a credit card number + expiry, is insufficient to make a transaction alone.




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