I literally setup an alias last week in O365 Outlook using the pattern a.b@c.com? I’ve been able to receive and send using the alias as well. Maybe this is a new feature/behavior?
I may have misunderstood the parent comment - with gmail, you can add dots anywhere in the mailbox and it all goes to the same place (standard gmail, not workspace)
e.g andrew@gmail.com, a.n.d.r.e.w@gmail.com and a.....ndrew@gmail.com all are the same user and will go into their mailbox (which I have used to avoid the + stripping that some sites do)
andrew@outlook.com and a.ndrew@outlook.com are two distinct users.
Obviously if you control the domain or use a provider who supports it you can add an alias with punctuation but then you might as well just use e.g ebay@c.com to track the email source.
