I used "+" aliasing with a Google mailbox for years but never really loved it. It leaks your actual address and, presumably, isn't even that good at tracking who you gave which address too. Either spammers or even the company you supplied the address to initially can drop the + part to strip the "alias" away so, if your data is going to be leaked, it's not clear how much a "+" alias helps. Plus, some sites have broken/overly strict address validation so you're forced to handing out your real address to the crappiest sites.

Last December I got serious about the problem and went looking for solutions. Specifically, I wanted to be able to route email to my existing mailbox, have unlimited aliases, operate the whole thing via and API and not pay much – this is for personal use after all.

There are stacks of businesses that will give you email forwarding on a domain but I found most of them either only relay messages using a webhook, rather than forwarding the actual email (SparkPost, SendGrid, Postmark, Mailchimp) or are expensive, often with the email forwarding service being a feature point of some premium plan or having arbitrary limits (Mailgun $35/mth, MailSlurp $21/mth, ImprovMX $9/mth for 100 domains x 100 aliases, MailerSend $25/mth).

The standout at the time was Forward Email (https://forwardemail.net) who offer unlimited domains/aliases/messages for $3/mth. They're privacy focused, open source and have some nice features like regex aliases with substitution in the forward address which is cool. (So you can have rules like `/^(domains|webmaster|admin|root)$/@example.com` forwarding to `$1@example.net` and `me+$1@example.com.au`)

I now have a bash script that wraps the Forward Email API. It takes the url of the page that's asking for an email (to be logged against the new alias) and an abbreviation for the service, and it spits out a new alias, with the abbreviation and a random component, that looks nothing like my real address. I registered a domain specifically for email which is short, easy to type, and a .com (so even the harshest/most broken form validation will accept my aliases). New aliases are immediately forward to my Google mailbox and still include the service abbreviation as a "+" alias, so I can still see at a glance who sent the message. (For example an alias for Hacker News might be `hn.u2la1@example.com` which would forward to my mailbox as `me+hn@example.net`). Any mail sent to a non-alias is silently black-holed.

I've been using this for all new accounts for a few months and it's working well for me. Forward Email isn't perfect but they're cheap and seem trustworthy. Support (which I used once) was great though I'm pretty sure the entire service is a one man band so arguably the bus factor is high. The docs aren't fantastic but has been working flawlessly since I got it running.

After I had this all setup I stumbled on another service, Hanami (https://hanami.run), which would also probably work for me ($2/month for 4 domains, unlimited aliases, regex routing). And now of course Cloudflare's solution is publicly available (https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-routing). If I was starting from scratch I'd definitely consider those options.