A white pattern is an idea that I'd considered but never actually tried implementing.

It has the advantage of being able to spontaneously create email addresses when signing up for things, while still blackholing most guessed addresses.

I like this idea a lot.

Easier to use sub-/plus-addressing rather than maintaining a list.

That seems like a white pattern to me.

If only delivering mail to existing email addresses is a white pattern, sure.

I don't follow.

If I configure me.example.com to accept emails matching the pattern "me<anything>[email protected]", then I can generate as many on-the-fly unique emails as I want, without maintaining any lists, and without catch-all forwarding of random spam to my inbox.

If I use [email protected], I get the same exact feature, but the downside is "+anything" is recognized by some and either disallowed or used to generate more patterns.

If I use subdomains (like [email protected]) I have the spam issue.

With a white pattern scheme, you can choose your own pattern (so sites can't really catch on), not have to maintain any lists, and avoid spray-and-pray spam.