"+merchant" doesn't do squat to prevent bad actors from selling your email address. Anyone so inclined to sell your address would just strip off the postfix since they know it's unnecessary per the spec.
Can confirm what parent poster is saying, we remove them on signup.
Also, if you try to mail people based on GeoIP data, you're going to have a bad time.
You could argue that a major feature of the GDPR is to legislate that just because a company can do something, doesn't mean it's allowed to do it.
user@domain.com
The 'detail' is optional, and doesn't infer any privacy.
It's kind of like if you get mail delivered to:
nprateem, office 2, university of ycombinator
and instead they only store:
nprateem, university of ycombinator
Odds are, mail will still be delivered to you, but it might not come to office 2, and might come to office 1 instead. It's not what you wanted, but there's absolutely no impact to your privacy by them stripping away additional details.
The 'user' part is still public information, as is what it's used for. There should be no expectation of privacy for information being used per specification design.
The usability trade-off is a shame, but the solution was half-baked at best, and is primarily useful when combined with privacy-sacrificing public email providers. When you have greater control of your email, distinct 'user' parts can be used, which does provide the privacy aspect desired.
> we also don’t operate in any country requiring compliance with the GDPR
You know it's nothing to do with the country you operate in but the nationalities of your customers though don't you? You could only have a presence on the moon but if you had any EU customers you'd still be bound by the GDPR AFAIK.
But why?
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5233
Not Gmail-specific. Labels however are ;)