tmailrPrivacy
Plus addressing: useful, and easier to strip than you think
27 July 2026 · 2 min read · TMailr
you+shop@gmail.com reaches you@gmail.com, and everything after the plus is yours to use. It is genuinely useful, free, and works today with no service in between. It is also not what most people think it is.
What it is good at
Filing, and attribution. A tag lets your client sort mail without a rule per sender, and when an address you only ever gave to one company starts receiving mail from somebody else, you know exactly who leaked it. That is real evidence, and it costs nothing to collect.
Where it stops
- Stripping the tag is one line of code. Anybody building a marketing list does it, so the tag rarely survives to the place a leak actually happens.
- Your real address is inside the string. A tagged address that leaks is an untagged address that leaked.
- Plenty of forms reject the plus outright, because their validation predates the last twenty years.
- You cannot switch one off. The mail keeps arriving whatever you learn about who sold it.
That last point is the difference that matters. A tag tells you an address leaked. An alias lets you do something about it.
The trade-off, plainly
Plus addressing costs nothing and gives you attribution. An alias costs a little setup and gives you attribution plus a switch. Neither hides you from a service you have given your name and card to; both keep your address out of the join between one database and the next.
What about a catch-all on your own domain?
anything@yourdomain.com is the third option and it is a trap unless you are careful. It gives you unlimited real-looking addresses with no tag to strip, which is genuinely better, and it means every address at your domain works, including the ten thousand a dictionary attack will try. Catch-alls collect spam the way a gutter collects leaves, and worse, they stop you refusing invalid recipients, which is one of the few reputation signals you control.
A reasonable arrangement
- Plus addressing for mail you expect: newsletters, receipts, anything you would notice missing.
- Aliases for addresses you hand to other people, especially anything with an account behind it.
- Your real address for the handful of things you would call to recover, and for nothing else.
The point of all three is the same: stop using one string as the identifier that links everything you do. Which tool you pick matters less than not having a single address in a hundred databases.
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