I also use this. Pros: super cheap. <$2/mo for all my custom email addresses and routing rules. Nothing else came close - everything else I found would make me pay per email address even if that address receives an average of 0 emails per month. The wildcard suffixes are really nice as well - they use _ instead of gmail's + (I've had issues with gmail's version as it sometimes is transparently removed, or sometimes the form doesn't consider + a valid character).
Cons: UI is bad, so you'll want to access through a client. 1 person shop. Not audited AFAIK.
Not a gmail invention perhaps, but also not per RFC. That some use it to mean something special is not in the RFC. Actually, a significant number of SMTP servers don't even implement the required parts of the related RFCs, let alone fancy things like plus handling.
You're right. Originally the + sign in an email address was an indicator to the Andrew Message System's delivery agent to process the email in an extensible way. The syntax was +<keyword>+<args>. As an example. you could use
"user+dir-insert+misc" to route the message to the "misc" directory in the user's mailbox structure. An unknown keyword would just get ignored and the mail delivered as usual, giving the behavior as used today.
As stated by others, + addressing is not gmail specific. One thing that gmail does however is allowing you to add (or remove) arbitrary dots in your mail-address, and these are stripped out / all end up in the same mailbox.
I know online services or any service depends a lot on personal interaction experiences and personal expectations from those services and people involved in those services, but I can't leave mailbox.org sooner.
I have tried/explored couple of them like Mailbox.org (of course, current user), Fastmail, Proton, and Runbox etc. Given everything http://runbox.com seems to be the best among them - much better than Mailbox. In fact for Mailbox their less than 'less than ideal' support is enough for me to move elsewhere once my balance runs out (which I foolishly pumped in more than I should have had)
Runbox isn't w/o its challenges but they do certain things really nice and they are: prompt, not into disregard a request in its entirety, not un-kind, not-jerk, not-flippant, not-entitled, not-costly, not into offering unusable shit that you don't need in an email suite to begin with, and basically open and engaging.
So while I am not a customer right now, once the mailbox.org balance is close to running out and I will leave mailbox (and leave them I will) Runbox is the first contender to replace them right now.
I tried runbox before mailbox.org but it didn't work for me.
They didn't support a server-side filter that copied emails from the inbox to another folder. And something was wrong with their DKIM support, but my notes don't say what.
mailbox.org has it's problems though and I'd be happy to find something better.
> didn't support a server-side filter that copied emails from the inbox to another folder
You mean a rule where you can say [mail:received-from="domain:xyz.com" > move to > "Saved" folder] - and it happens, something like this? Honestly I did not check it but I guess they might handle it.
During my trials I didn't find any issue with their DKIM support. https://help.runbox.com/dkim-signing/ seems fine to me. You might want to ask if you are interested, unlike mailbox.org they do reply, and they reply promptly, and they reply as if they mean it.
> I'd be happy to find something better
Please do share here on HN if you happen to find something better. Cheers.
Oh, maybe I didn't mean the same as you. I can create as many email addresses as I want, but they all go to the same inbox. Multiple inboxes would cost more.
In the pricing page it is listed in the "Individual" plan as "+ Extra email addresses for personal and work".
Edit: It is possible to create an extra email address and set it up so that all emails it receives are sent to a different external email address
Various shared hosting likely will always beat this price. Caveat is that many shared hosters don't know how to properly run mail servers within their shared hosting infra. Many do, however.
posteo has been great for me and also allows you to define aliases, thou each alias costs 10c per month. If you stay below 10 aliases, it is <2€ per month as well.
Cons: UI is bad, so you'll want to access through a client. 1 person shop. Not audited AFAIK.