[bityard]

I self-host my own email server (against The Greater Internet's better judgement, it feels) and one of the neat things I can do with Postfix is set any arbitrary character as a username/junk separator.

Gmail has supported this for a long time with the '+' character, but this has some major problems. Many things that accept email addresses don't recognize '+' as a valid email username character and won't let you submit the form. I hypothesize that some of this is poor awareness of what constitutes a valid email address, and some of it is intentional to force users to input their "real" email address. I have also run across a few systems that stripped off the '+' suffix off my gmail address.

My solution is to use the '.' as the separator because 'firstname.lastname' is a VERY common email username and I'm happy to not allow it in a "real" username on my tiny mail host.

So every new site or company I interact with gets [e-mail] instead of my "real" email address. I can filter incoming emails based on the To header. And I even have a list of companies (a couple well-known) that have leaked or sold my email address to spammers. Some day I'll write a blog post about that.

[meew0]

I do this too. It's worth noting that you don't need to host your own email server to do this. I personally use Migadu as an email host for my own domains which lets me define arbitrary wildcard redirects. I'm sure most of its competitors will let you do the same.

[taftster]

Note that Gmail also supports dots as well (similar to your postfix solution).

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150?hl=en

[isbvhodnvemrwvn]

Not quite, it's not a separator, you can't add arbitrary content after the dot. Dots are just ignored in Gmail, so you need to keep a map of dot placement and quantity to service, vastly less convenient.

[taftster]

Yes, you're right. The dots thing isn't as powerful as the + separator. But it is useful for sites that have a poor understanding (or regex) associated to their address validator. In context of the parent comment, that's the point, that the dots aren't restricted as the plus separator can be.

[AH4oFVbPT4f8]

Do you ever have issues sending messages using [e-mail] as the from address?

Some companies want you to respond from the email address on file when you interact with them.

[grayhatter]

I do something similar except I make up a custom email every time. (No plus addressing at all, everything without a valid destination goes to the default account) It's rare something doesn't like it, most automated systems use the reply to header. Email lists are usually the ones least tolerant.

[bityard]

No, most companies that get the special email treatment don't accept email from customers anyway.

If I did it, I would have to set it manually. I don't know of an email client that supports setting the From header to the address in the To header of the relied-to message, but it feels like something that would be fairly easy to do as a Thunderbird plugin or whatever.