Hi Nicole,

You’re right that spammers _could_ copy in the addresses pre-plus sign. This could, of course, be a different person (plus signs are valid in email addresses!), but spammers rarely care. Indeed, some spammers are probably doing this!

But everything you do that adds effort to what a spammer has to do is valuable. Spammers are generally pretty lazy: sending email is cheap but the number of people who respond to your mail is low, so it’s usually in a spammer’s interest to send a message to a million people and then move on. If they have to spent an extra 5 minutes sorting out a filter for plus signs only to copy in a _few_ extra people… none of which will probably take the bait anyway… then it’s a waste of their time and they needn’t bother.

If that’s insufficient reassurance, you can can go further! So long as you ONLY give out your email address with a plus sign in it, you can reject any mail that DOESN’T have a plus sign in it. So a spammer not only needs to notice the plus sign – they need to replace the bit afterwards with a different bit, ideally one that you’ve already used elsewhere.

Or – my favourite technique – you can get your own domain name and set up a “catch-all” email address: i.e. “everything to anything @danq.me comes to me, EXCEPT these addresses”. Then you can give a completely different email address to everybody you deal wth (no plus signs needed) and get all the same advantages. But it does involve buying a domain name (which isn’t a bad idea regardless).

Choose the right approach for you! Good luck!