Comment 3 for bug 119028

Barry Warsaw wrote:
> Address extensions aren't universally supported. I know in Postfix you
> must specifically enable them, and I don't remember what the default is.
> I think there's only a small (but vocal) audience for +addresses. Which
> is not to say we shouldn't support their use! I fully agree that we
> should.

And some mail servers use a different delimiter. For instance, I have a mail
account where "-foo" suffixes are delivered to my account, rather than "+foo" as
used by gmail. Postfix allows you to configure your server either way (or in
fact with arbitrary delimiters IIRC).

> Having said that, I'm not sure I see the use case for treating these
> addresses any differently than an other address. You can't /know/ that
> a +address is treated specially by the recipient, so you have to expect
> that they aren't. OTOH, allowing a user to hide addresses (even
> +addresses) is a good thing.

In general, you have no idea just from an email address where it's going to be
delivered, and I'm not sure why Launchpad needs to care. For example, I have
addresses at completely different domains that all reach the same set of
Maildirs on a particular server, but looking at the addresses you can't tell
that this is so.

I share Barry's opinion that we should just treat all email addresses equally.

If it's desired that a user can have email addresses visible and not others, why
not let that user set an explicit flag per address?