Ha! Exactly this happens to me too. Had to return some electronics in person, the guy suddenly started fishing if I was some mystery shopper or QC person... because the invoice was made out to their.store@myname.email

That said I've caught and blacklisted quite a few bad actors this way, AND filtering is easier. So worth the occasional weird interaction.

> their.store@myname.email

I did this for a decade and decided it was't worth it, nor the plus in gmail addresses.

It was a ton of effort remembering which address I used (I have multiple domains, too, oh joy).

I would end up with multiple accounts on websites, and support calls were super painful.

Eventually I switched providers and realized that in all that time I literally never found any "smoking gun" of a company selling my info.

And the plus email addresses were super useless because spammers know they can just strip out the bit after the plus. Duh.

In fact, my "real" email address that kept super secret and never ever ever gave to anyone except real in-the-flesh human friends (and thus never got any real email to, lol) was by far and away the most compromised email address. Stratospherically compromised.

Turns out most of the human population do not understand the difference between the local part and the domain part. I’ve had this too. They ask if I work there because I have store.name@myname.com. No , go and read the RFCs…

> That said I've caught and blacklisted quite a few bad actors this way

same! A long time ago I registered an adobe account with the email "<username>+fsck_adobe@gmail.com"

Adobe then got hacked and their account database leaked. Later I got a personalized spam email for a dating site sent to the same +fsck_adobe@gmail email. I complained, and they claimed innocence, saying they got the email from some sort of contact lead service. I then got in touch with that contact lead service's CEO, and of course he had "no idea" how that email got in there. I'm sure they knew very well how it got in there, and after I reported it, they just removed everything after a "+" on @gmail.com emails...