You'll have to remember which position the period was in when you signed up for each service, and there are a limited amount of combinations. For example: could be entered as the following when signing up for one website: then as this when signing up for a different website: to the + symbol, Gmail outright ignores any periods in user names and delivers the email as if they weren't there. If that happens, you can use another Gmail trick: add a period somewhere in your user name. You might run into an issue where the service you're signing up for doesn't allow you to input a + symbol in the email field. So check that Sender field on your next spam message. The reason this works is because Gmail ignores everything after a + sign in any email addresses, yet still delivers the emails. If you sign up for a TikTok account with and then you start getting a lot of spam emails with that specific address as the recipient, you'll know it was TikTok who sold your email address - sort of like a marked bill, if you will. So this standard email format: would become something like: use the app's name so it's easier to find the culprit. The next time you sign up for an account with an app or website, add a + symbol and a unique identifier after your user name, but before the symbol. Don't Miss: How to Use Google Voice as a Burner Number.

But companies get away with it because they're not the ones directly spamming you, so you don't normally have a way of knowing which service is the one who sold your data. It's a shady tactic that's symptomatic of the current era of big data, and it may even be illegal in some jurisdictions.

Not directly, no - you sign up for an app or service and happily hand over your email to verify your new account, then that app or service sells your email address to marketers who now know what kinds of apps and services you like. How do spammers get your email? You give it to them.

How does dot gmail trick work