Unless you do some kind of verification and filter email sent to addresses without a valid suffix?
The hard part is social acceptance. This morning the Whirpool technician was very puzzled by me giving him whirpool@domain.tld as my email, although he accepted my explanations in the end. (I might use more opaque identifiers, but then I would forget about what is what, so for the moment I am trying to stick with this scheme, until it becomes too difficult)
The only non-public email so far that has resulted in a lot of spam was the one I gave to the animal shelter when I adopted my cat. (I count unsolicited advertisements as spam.)
home@domain.tld is for anyone and anything dealing with my physical home. Delivery of an appliance, repairs, homeowner's insurance and such. I expect the email volume here to be low except when ordering something.
fly@domain.tld is for any flight reservations. That's pretty convenient, I can find any old tickets or travel details by filtering for this address, and I also know any incoming mail is likely an ad, unless I just bought tickets.
hotel@domain.tld is for all hotel reservations, and is even more convenient. Unlike flights, I never need any emails from hotels except to see that my stay has been confirmed.
And on the rare occasions I expect to need a throwaway email, I'll use somethingrandom@domain.tld and point it to /dev/null after receiving what I needed.
Personally, i've just replaced the recipient_delimiter default value(+) with "." as that is basically impossible to strip out. Ex, firstname.COMPANY@example.net
I do get a lot of weird looks when handing the addresses out in person, but a quick explanation usually works. I just tell them, that if I start receiving spam from one one the addresses, I can just block it and be done with it. They sometimes counter with "but we won't spam you" and I acknowledge that with "but not everyone is so nice as you" or something like that.
ps: you can use multiple delimiters, so grouping is possible with firstname.bills.COMPANY@example.net
Edit: Downvote me all you want, they're still breaking the law… In the US there's the CAN-SPAM act (https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can...) and nearly every other country has similar laws. Most of them require one-click unsubscribes to work.
It's still failure to comply even if it's due to negligence/ignorance/incompetence.
> I have several services I will never be able to unsubscribe from because of the latter—and yes, I tried manually URI encoding it
Individuals cannot sue under CAN-SPAM Act and I don't think any state Attorney General is going to bring a suit on my behalf because they didn't accommodate a plus alias.
https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us
The technical details as to why they are failing to unsubscribe you does not matter at all. What matters is, you've unsubscribed repeatedly and they are failing to register your intent.
'+' has no special meaning. The relevant standards only say that senders can't dictate how a system encodes its addresses. No law is in place to compel that behavior. If that were the case I'd love to force ISPs supposedly selling IP services to allow unencumbered use of port 25, residential servers, and transport protocols other than TCP and UDP.
As certain addresses get spam and/or I lose interest in the business I gave the address to, I add them to the blacklist. So far, I'm using AWS SES, which seems to be focused on the sending of marketing emails, and are not fussed on receiving, but includes rudimentary blacklisting. So far, it's zero cost.
Then I have a script that uses the AWS CLI to move all the mail from the bucket to a local dovecot server.
The whole thing is really hacky/experimental at the moment, and I haven't given out any addresses, so all that I receive is spam. But the spam I do receive is very little and quickly adds to the blocked recipients list.
Sending using SES uses the built-in SMTP server functionality at AWS and has very generous limits for one who is not marketing.
(Though on the other hand thankfully I'm still not getting much spam anyway and it's only a few addresses that were affected, so I only have a limited amount of data to go by.)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Subaddressing
Equals specifically is used by mailing list software (esp. Mailman) for bounce processing (VERP):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_envelope_return_path