Of course it should appear in my Gmail inbox: I actively give out the email and thereby expect that my recipient can send me mail whatever they want. If I give Bob's Spam Emporium the email address "squirehamboard@gmail.com" which means "me+bobspam@gmail.com" then that means I've given Bob the means to email me whatever they want. You literally give someone permission to email you when you give them an email address, it's pretty much the definition of giving out an email address.

If Bob starts going overboard on emailing squirehamboard@gmail.com that doesn't mean I don't still want to see all that crap. Maybe I really care about what Bob has to say.

Or maybe he's selling email address to sweepstakes companies, Nigerian princes, investment opportunities, fake legal notices, and so forth.

It's nice of Google to try to decide these things and help me classify my mail. But ultimately providing email aliases is an important step.

They have all of the comment functionality in place (me+comment@gmail.com goes to me@gmail.com with the label comment) and now just need to be able to give me an alias for "me+comment" so that I can give that out instead of my valuable string "me", which I don't want to give spammers.

It's not really rocket science. They're 99.99% of the way there.

I hope sooner or later some luminary will take that final 0.01% and let me stop using mailinator for registrations that I expect have a high chance of spamming me in the future. :)

I'd like to be able to trust Bob's Spam Emporium first, have it really go to my inbox, and only redirect squirehamboard (i.e. me+bobspam@gmail.com) if I ever read an email that I shouldn't have gotten to it. (Since it'll be labelled bobspam it'll be easy for me to decide if I want to nuke it all or just redirect it.)

Gmail's spam filtering is pretty good. Ultimately, part of what makes it good though is that I don't give my gmail address out to spammy sites at all.

I bet I'd get a lot more spam if I didn't use mailinator as well...