tl;dr - I started a newsletter for ideas, and I love seeing subscribers with emails like someone+ideas@provider.com

Last month I started a newsletter for unvalidated ideas. I know what you’re thinking – Execution is everything – aren’t ideas nearly worthless? Wouldn’t that make the newsletter worth zero or possibly less due to cost of reading?

Well I don’t have the answers to any of those probing questions, but one of the most unexpected things I’ve run into is just how much I enjoy seeing someone+ideas@provider.com.

In a world where:

• subscribers are sometimes bots or just never confirm their subscriptions for some reason (probably because they are bots)
• subscribers use ephemeral email addresses
• subscribers use temporary email addresses

I now love when I see an email address like someone+vadosware@gmail.com or something of the sort. These are “my people” – privacy conscious curious types (who haven’t gone all-in on Apple’s private email relay just yet). It feels like a indication of trust, with verification in the “trust but verify sense”.

That said, I’m a little less pumped when I see apple private mail relay addresses, but I know it’s the same crowd so I’m sure it’s going to make me happy in the long run as well once I’m more used to it.

In the end, knowing that someone was interested enough to sign up (and are sensible enough to want to protect their priacy) is awesome as far as I’m concerned.

Dot addresses (someone.suffix@provider.com) are pretty well supported and are probably harder for spammers to figure out – + is too unnatural of a character, and is pretty easy to judge as removable. Happy to see those as well, as that’s what I use more recently personally (I run ProtonMail these days).