This is such a waste of effort. Your E-mail address is not and can't be a secret. It will get into spammer databases eventually, no matter what you do. You will spend a lot of effort doing all these fancy tricks, and eventually you will get spam anyway.

Also, a note to those who make fancy "me+someservice@somedomain.com" addresses: make really sure you are in control and these work. Some services (including mine) will need to E-mail you one day, for example to tell you that your account will be deleted because of inactivity. If you don't receive that E-mail because of your fancy spam defenses, your account will be deleted. I've seen people hurt themselves like this and it makes me sad.

On a constructive note: what works very well is spam filtering using LLMs. We have AI to help us with this problem today. I wrote an LLM despammer tool which processes my inbox via IMAP using a local LLM (for privacy reasons). I see >97% accuracy in my benchmarks on my (very difficult) testing corpus. It's nearly perfect in real life usage. I've tested many local models in the 4-32B range and the top practical choice is gpt-oss:20b (GGUF, I run it from LM Studio, MLX quantizations are worse) — not only does it perform very well, but it's also really fast.

Plus-addressing is built in to most email services. There's no 'fancy' set up to break; it just works. That is, there's no way me@gmail.com works but me+someservice@gmail.com doesn't, unless you explicitly configure it not to work. Similarly for custom domains on most services.

If you use a catch-all on a domain, i.e. someservice@somedomain.com, I guess in theory that might break. But it seems about as likely as messing up the overall domain setup.

Also, my account on your service is likely much more disposable to me than my email address/domain. Anything I care about, I'd back up. Not just assume some random website is going to preserve it for me forever.

The techniques in the article right now have had around 95%-100% success at avoiding spam and take about 5 min. to implement. Your approach of putting an LLM in front of your inbox gives 97% accuracy, may have false positives (so you may not receive that account deletion email after all), requires to run inference and, I assume, would take at least an hour to setup.

Also, the two can be complementary, anyways, so I am not sure what your point is.

> Also, a note to those who make fancy "me+someservice@somedomain.com" addresses:

Just wait until one of these companies demands an email from the registered email address of your account!

Plus tags annoy signup forms more than they slow spam crawlers. If you're spending this much effort on obfuscation, run a sane mail filter and save the weird tricks for the sites that insist on emailing you later, because some apps treats a plus alias as invalid and then you get to debug their broken account recovery.

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