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"Can I take an email address for an online receipt?"

I remember standing behind a guy in a queue in Screwfix. He'd bought a screwdriver for a couple of quid or whatever. As usual, the assistant asked for an email address, which he wasn't keen on giving, so they wouldn't sell it to him! Hopefully that isn't their policy now, but who knows?
 
Set up a gmail email address with a 64 character “high encryption standard” (the kind that password generators produce) random character email address, it’s IETF approved and satisfies the RFC 3696 described maximum length, this has three advantages: put it on a little card.


Like: JRtOjDW5o8jOS8956XkMUFrmoXze0Q7ZlqvUwzI6rOWbnlQhpz0pNN0UvfNeHG5@gmail.com

  1. You have an email address satisfying their phoney: “it’s required” criteria, it is not.
  2. You hurt them — hard — by wasting their staff time (if they are stupid enough to try and enter it) and they will enter it incorrectly — if attempted by a meatsack. Extra points is to substitute O with 0 and note underneath that all Number zeroes are letter O, this means it’s not readable with OCR.
  3. Most customer databases have smaller character provision than IETF/RFC maximum because the databases assume smaller lengths and no one checks using forensic validity even when a ready-made Python front end exists. This means the database field could not be completed or suffer a stack overflow and best case is it crashes their database (if really badly setup) — either outcome is good. Wanna hurt them more? You can just squeeze a full SQL variant like {DROP TABLE SCHEMA PUBLIC CASCADE [ALL]} in there, you never know, you might get lucky, it still catches out some.
You’re welcome

If you feel pissy then just say sales@[shop’s domain name] — an update of the old “head office” address trick. Or make something up: I sometimes use [email protected]
 
Last edited:
wylton said:
I remember standing behind a guy in a queue in Screwfix. He'd bought a screwdriver for a couple of quid or whatever. As usual, the assistant asked for an email address, which he wasn't keen on giving, so they wouldn't sell it to him! Hopefully that isn't their policy now, but who knows?
Click to expand...
Never had that one. I often buy without giving details, even thought they have my details on record. It depends what mood I'm in.
 
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