Same here! Both GMail and iCloud Mail support this, among others.

It works 95% of the time, but be aware that it sometimes doesn't:

- Some webpages refuse addresses with a + in it.

- I’ve had at least one instance where I lost an important email because I could register and receive emails from them, but one of their internal databases silently failed on my address. (I lost the proofs for a paper accepted in a journal, and it took some time to figure out what was going on…)

- There was at least one web page that was smart enough to just remove the +… from my address after I registered.

- Some webpages require you to be able to send emails to them from the exact address you sign up with (including the +…)

Overall I’ve been happy with the feature since it makes e-mail sorting easier, and you can just redirect a given subaddress to spam if they leak it, and it’s less effort than creating a “real” email alias per page. Just keep in mind that there are many ways it can fail, so you might not want to use it for anything that is actually important.

When you can't use a + use a .

[email protected] is [email protected] is [email protected] is [email protected] etc

This works for some providers (Google) but definitely isn't universal - MS/Outlook doesn't support it for example

I literally setup an alias last week in O365 Outlook using the pattern [email protected]? I’ve been able to receive and send using the alias as well. Maybe this is a new feature/behavior?

I may have misunderstood the parent comment - with gmail, you can add dots anywhere in the mailbox and it all goes to the same place (standard gmail, not workspace)

e.g [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected] all are the same user and will go into their mailbox (which I have used to avoid the + stripping that some sites do)

[email protected] and [email protected] are two distinct users.

Obviously if you control the domain or use a provider who supports it you can add an alias with punctuation but then you might as well just use e.g [email protected] to track the email source.

Since I run my own email server, I get around some of those issues by configuring Postfix's recipient_delimiter to use . rather than +. I've never had a site treat [email protected] as anything other than a normal email address. It certainly doesn't justify the effort I've spent dealing with deliverability issues, but it's a nice perk.

Why not use proxy email addresses to prevent scripts that strip everything from + to @?

The benefit of the + is that I don’t have to set up anything in advance. I can type an email address on any device, including devices I don’t own, and still have it work as an alias.

I do have a “real” email alias as well that I use for true spam (e.g. to get “customer club” discounts while everything they send me is autoredirected to spam by a mail filter). I reserve the + addresses for things I want in my inbox, but still want to be able to filter easily in my mail client.

I have a mail with catch all address so o can avoid the + so sites can never be strip it as it just randommail@domain, just have to hope nobody else figures it out and spams me at random addresses

Sign the random with a hash of itself and a secret, all before the @ sign, then you can tell them apart.