Allegedly, on or about 08 March 2016, Cameron Simpson sent:
That depends on your point of view. Technically, this whole thing:
Cameron Simpson cs@zip.com.au
is my email address. A mail system is only meant to pay attention to certain parts of it for delivery purposes, but it is _all_ "my address".
Well, from what I've read, mostly long ago. You get
display name (comment) <address>
Whack a comma on the end, and you can build up a list of other addresses, to send emails to multiple recipients. And because of that (using a comma as a delimiter), if you want a comma in your display name, you need to quote it. e.g. "Doe, John" john@example.com
But the /address/ is the only part used for delivery purposes. As far as the SMTP system is concerned, that's the address.
But I take your point. If I write an address on a snail mail envelope, we do consider the whole thing the address to them. Though, generally speaking, the post office doesn't care about the name. They're like SMTP, only caring about the location details. You're going to need to know your local postman on a more personal level before they hesitate in giving you an envelope with someone else's name on it.
If you suspect someone you write to is responsible for spam coming in your direction, you can slightly tailor your personal details outside of the address, and see if they get passed along, to confirm your suspicions.
Ah. Disinformation! Neat. Has this ever paid off for you?
Unfortunately, not. When it's come to submitting my address to something, on-line or otherwise, I always forget to do so. But I have caught one or two out by using completely different email addresses. That's one benefit of owning your own domain name, you can create new addresses as you see fit. Well, you can do that with some other services, too, but you have to jump through more hoops. One day we're going to be screwed by a company that insists on phone verification, and only one email address per phone number.
If I'd remembered to modify an existing address, I could have saved myself that extra hassle. Though I really don't want to do it by slightly misspelling my name, as some people do with this trick. Seeing my name wrong is just too grating.
Some of the big services did allow you to make sub-addresses to your existing account, either by adding a plus symbol and a word before the @ sign, or sometimes a dot, without having to configure anything extra with them (simply use the additional address, and it accepts it).
e.g. someone+extrabit@example.com or someone.extrabit@example.com