AgriLife Information Technology

Plus Addressing- Adding Something Extra to your Emails

About

Plus Addressing, also known as sub-addressing, allows you to create a disposable email address that you can use to receive particular emails.

It can make sorting messages using Rules in your mailbox much easier. It can also provide added protection as it doesn’t use your actual email address.

How it Works

Let’s say your email address is Fred.Flintstone@ag.tamu.edu

You want to sign up for a newsletter called The Bedrock Bowler.

You can enter Fred.Flintstone+TheBedrockBowler@ag.tamu.edu on the Bedrock Bowler’s sign up form.

The Bedrock Bowler newsletters will arrive in your inbox, and will appear to have been sent to the Fred.Flintstone+TheBedrockBowler@ag.tamu.edu address.

You can set a rule to sent all emails sent to Fred.Flintstone+TheBedrockBowler@ag.tamu.edu to your Newsletters folder in Outlook.

Benefits

  • You can set a mailbox rule to move all emails sent to the plus address to a particular folder, or have them forward on to someone else if you need to- any rule that you can currently use in Outlook, you can use on an email sent to a plus address
  • You can easily create unlimited disposable email addresses
  • Sites you use a plus address on technically never get your real address

A major advantage of this feature is that if a company sells or shares your contact information, you can easily find out which company or site did it. If you start receiving emails from a third party or unknown sender, you can easily see which plus address was shared, since you will start receiving the emails from the unknown sender at an address you created for a specific company.

Things to Remember

  • Plus Addresses can only be used to receive messages- you cannot send from them
  • You cannot have spaces in the address
  • Some online forms currently do not accept + in the email address field. This is a relatively new feature, and some companies either don’t support or allow Plus Addressing yet