So we have: plus, hyphen, equals, period, and pound/hashtag.

Postfix and Exim allow configuring an arbitrary separator from the legal character set. For example, the address denotes the same delivery address as RFC 5233, refers to this convention as sub-addressing, but it is also known as plus addressing, tagged addressing or mail extensions.Īddresses of this form, using various separators between the base name and the tag, are supported by several email services, including Runbox (plus), Gmail (plus), Rackspace Email (plus), Yahoo! Mail Plus (hyphen), Apple’s iCloud (plus), Outlook (plus), ProtonMail (plus), FastMail (plus and Subdomain Addressing), MMDF (equals), Qmail and Courier Mail Server (hyphen). Some mail services support a tag included in the local-part, such that the address is an alias to a prefix of the local part. Discourse isn’t supported by default in most commercially available forum spamming software as far as I know, like Xrumer. Not being targeted by spammers is a nice defense, until you get targeted. I have several other Discourse forums running since 2015-2016 and they have virtually no issues at all with spam registrations or posts, due to not being targeted. Spammers making significant money per month spamming their direct response campaigns on a specific forum, who may live in developing countries with extremely low average local salaries, might be motivated. Homepage above the fold ad space can very commonly be worth $xxx - $x,xxx per day depending on niche and traffic volume.

A spammer who can keep posts near the top of the posts list is essentially getting fantastic ad space for pennies on the dollar. It heavily depends on the niche, traffic volumes and if it’s suitable for their direct response spam campaigns. Do you credit this to sufficient defenses for this common spammer technique or those sites not being targeted by spammers? Do those sites get regular large volumes of attempted spam registrations of any sort that are blocked by defenses?

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