[typicalbender]

Hard truth is you're not worth enough for a spammer to look for that pattern, it's a numbers game and you're just making it harder on yourself.

Also unless you're keeping a lookup table you're losing a great benefit of the wildcard. You can, and I have caught a few places, tell when a company sells your email. If I get an email from company XYZ to my email [e-mail] I know exactly who sold my email and to whom.

[rootusrootus]

I agree that I'm probably not worth the effort, but if this kind of domain wildcard strategy were to become more popular it is entirely feasible for a rudimentary machine learning algorithm to detect its use.

> unless you're keeping a lookup table you're losing a great benefit of the wildcard

That's true, I don't keep a lookup table per se, though I do have a deleted items folder that I could look back in. I'm not sure what I would do, though, if I knew what particular company sold my email address? Send them a nastygram they will just ignore? I just block the address and move on.

[labawi]

I think a typical spammer doesn't care much about such users, but if given given a choice they would rather avoid such users.

AFAIU, most buld spam is targeted on gullible or vulnerable people. The spam is often terrible on purpose.

Sophisticated or targeted attacks are a different category and they may be a good reason to prefer something non-guessable.