For anyone who wants to do this easily: afaik (ymmv) most mail systems will accept aliases to your account if you put a + after your email username. for example, if you’re foo@example.com, then foo+bar@example.com would still route to your inbox but you’d be able to see that it was sent to a different address than your own. i do this for any email i put into a website I don’t trust (which is most) and if you use the company name it’s a really easy way to see who sold your data
For a spammer it literally takes less than ten seconds to clean a list of one million addresses from “plus addresses” and get back the original one without the source. Only amateur spammers use raw lists without any sanitization
Just be aware that it’s not guaranteed - I’ve had services remove everything after the ‘+something’ on my email address. Some will also not see that as a valid email address, depending on how they do their input validation.
For anyone who wants to do this easily: afaik (ymmv) most mail systems will accept aliases to your account if you put a + after your email username. for example, if you’re foo@example.com, then foo+bar@example.com would still route to your inbox but you’d be able to see that it was sent to a different address than your own. i do this for any email i put into a website I don’t trust (which is most) and if you use the company name it’s a really easy way to see who sold your data
For a spammer it literally takes less than ten seconds to clean a list of one million addresses from “plus addresses” and get back the original one without the source. Only amateur spammers use raw lists without any sanitization
Just be aware that it’s not guaranteed - I’ve had services remove everything after the ‘+something’ on my email address. Some will also not see that as a valid email address, depending on how they do their input validation.