[joeyhage]

Completely agree - have you encountered this before? The Gmail plus sign alias trick has been widely known for a long time and, to my knowledge, still works well today. It would be easy enough for websites to either block + in gmail addresses or instead grab the true email.

[cloudfudge]

Some sites that block "+" in email addresses are actually just doing it out of incompetence. My credit union, for example, will actually accept an address with a "+" in it, but nothing will work because some broken bit of web 1.0 plumbing along the way converted it to a space (it shows up that way on my profile page). I wouldn't be surprised to see "&nbsp" on my printed bank statements.

[janc_]

Oh yes, so many websites are incompetent like that.

And of course after registering with [e-mail] they will happily send invoices to [e-mail]

[SXX]

Gmail also have "googlemail.com" alias and you can split your username with dots since they dont count like "[e-mail]" and "[e-mail]" are the same thing,

Nothing of it solves privacy though.

[autoexec]

Spammers know to just cut out the +whatever. It's a simple regex to keep those from even getting into a database.

[janc_]

The + has no special meaning in the standards, and thus removing it will just result in invalid addresses in many cases…

[AlexandrB]

Doesn't matter. Most email services[1] use it the way Gmail does and spam is a numbers game. Losing a few valid addresses is worth correlating all those other addresses for most spammers.

Standards only matter to nerds like us.

[1] https://proton.me/blog/what-is-email-alias#5

[Ferret7446]

Except plus address users are also less likely to be receptive to spam, so it's probably better to just not bother

[inigyou]

Spam has never been about how "receptive" the recipient is.

[inigyou]

They can check if it's Gmail though.

[ciupicri]

Guess what? There are some dumb website or applications complaining that the email address is invalid.