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by setopt 675 days ago
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.

2 comments

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 accounts.company@mydomain.com 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.
When you can't use a + use a .

Name@email.com is n.ame@email.com is n.a.me@email.com is n.am.e@email.com 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 a.b@c.com? 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 andrew@gmail.com, a.n.d.r.e.w@gmail.com and a.....ndrew@gmail.com all are the same user and will go into their mailbox (which I have used to avoid the + stripping that some sites do)

andrew@outlook.com and a.ndrew@outlook.com 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 ebay@c.com to track the email source.