Spammers know of the "+" trick, which was popularized by GMail. If they have any level of sophistication at all, they'll /+.*@/@/

Plus-tag stripping sounds like a no-brainer for spammers to do, but I've never come across this behavior yet.

I always give out myname+tag@... to places that ask for email, and have an incoming message rule that puts bare myname@ straight into spam folder.

So far, the only messages to bare address were service updates from my email provider itself.

I have received phishing attempts for cryptoscams that still had my tagged address and identified the source of the leak that way... but I'm sure there are more cautious scammers and spammers who removes it, still can be the poorman's version of a catchall address I guess.

Sounds like it's time for someone to set up an email service that offers the same functionality without the +. There would be some headaches and it would limit the degrees of freedom users have with base email addresses, but I'd use it!

Fastmail already provides this feature if you have a custom domain.

If you have 'domain.com' you can receive emails either on 'foo@domain.com' or 'bar@foo.domain.com' without problems.

Apple and Proton Mail both let you do this without the plus sign. You just have to generate the alias through their password apps.

Fastmail lets you make as many redirects as you want, no + in them.

You can even get an api key for it and plug that into bitwarden, so that when you sign up for whatever, you click bitwarden, generate password, generate email, sign in and it's all set. So smooth. (I sound like an ad, but internet pinky promise no affiliation)

https://relay.firefox.com/ may be a tool for that. I never used it, as I use a catch-all, but may use it in the future.

It sounds like panix already did.