No idea what sort of security this is supposed to provide.
They probably see it as some sort of security / anti-spam mechanism.
My emails have a tendency to become spam filter bycatch, to the point that when I was job hunting last year I'd have to ring people after I sent them my resumes etc. to confirm they actually received my email.
And when I give people my email address, I usually have to assure them that [email protected] is a legitimate email address and not a joke (it's not actually steve, but you get the point).
Definitely would not recommend using it for your personal address.
If he said he used "[email protected]", then it's possible he has a wildcard MX record for *.example.com, but that's not at all what he said, although perhaps it's what he meant.
Regardless, the question remains unanswered.
I also use greg-*@domain instead of *@domain, since their docs claim that setting up *@domain tends to attract more spam.
It's not cheap from PM, and there are loads of hosting providers that will provide catch-all email for free with your hosting package (but with some usually pretty poor webmail client) or if you use a mail client it should work too.
I like having good webmail and mail app and other things so I pay, but there are plenty of good options available. Sadly self-hosting email server is not really an option for a variety of reasons, but you should easily be able to use catch-all e-mail addresses.
At some point, I need to migrate away from google and build out my own personal mail server.
The one exception is Craigslist; if I email someone with my normal email, I never get a response. I always use gmail for that.
It's a freemium model, but I've never needed anything in the paid tier
Sounds like this was in person at store though which is extra weird because seems unlikely that scammers would be trying to sign up en masse at a physical location (unlike if the form is connected to the internet)
[email protected] thus became [email protected]
I tried logging in, resetting passwords, nothing worked. I had to go to the authorities and make a written request to allow them to interrogate the database by the equivalent of my social security number, and that’s when we realized they just stripped the +.
Much more reliable than the + -thing, which breaks in the weirdest of places.
I had to switch my hosting provider at one point because they stopped supporting catch-all. I have no idea how many "addresses" I've used, since I don't create a specific email for each, so I had to get new hosting (note: this was over 10 years ago)
> I also get a lot of email from idiots who don't know their own address
Holy crap there are a lot of them. I've got one bank sending me the dude's statements. He's also been on some interesting trips, seen all his hotel stays, etc.
The other finally figured it out but his wife still hasn't after more than a decade. It gets really old receiving reminders to service a vehicle I've never owned from a dealership 2000 miles away among other similar crap.
Samsung doesn't accept emails with "samsung" as prefix, so I have [email protected] for them. I have no idea what's the logic behind.
Unfortunately, many websites are configured to reject email addresses that contain a plus character. I've also encountered websites in the past that did accept the + character when creating the account where the email address serves as the user name, but then could not log in because their log in form rejected the + character in the user name.