What is Plus Addressing?

Plus addressing

Plus addressing means any email sent to: username+whateveryoulike@domain.tld still delivered to your account. The part of the email address between the “+” and the “@” is ignored for determining which account it belongs to. This allows you to create to, variations on your email address to give out to different people, sites or mailing lists.

If the part after the “+” matches the name of one of your folders (see below for how the matching works), the message will automatically be delivered there instead of your Inbox. You don’t even need to create an explicit rule!

For example, suppose you gave someone the address.username+hiking@domain.tld Any messages sent to this address will be delivered to,username@domain.tld and if you have a folder called Hiking, will be delivered straight to that folder rather than your Inbox.

How a folder is matched

Plus addressing use fuzzy folder matching. When a regular folder match fails, folders are compared case-insensitively, with the hyphen (“-“), underscore (“_”) and space (” “) characters treated the same. A full stop (“.”) is used to separate a parent from a subfolder. So if you have a folder “Mailing Lists.My List”, then messages sent to username+mailing-lists.my_list@domain.tld will get filed into that folder.

If after a match the delivery of the mail should have been to a subfolder but the subfolder does not exist, the mail is delivered to the parent folder, rather than to the Inbox. For example, if you sent a message to username+mailing-lists.hiking@domain.tld and you don’t have a subfolder “Hiking” under the “Mailing Lists” folder, then the email will go to the “Mailing Lists” folder rather than the Inbox.

If you create a rule that files the message into a folder, this will override the folder matching described above.