Unlimited GMail Addresses
By Deane Barker on September 10, 2006
Use Gmail Generate Unlimited E-mail Addresses: Here’s a feature in Gmail I didn’t know about.
Gmail has an interesting quirk where you can add a plus sign ( ) after your Gmail address, and it’ll still get to your inbox. It’s called plus-addressing, and it essentially gives you an unlimited number of e-mail addresses to play with.
You can use it to filter email, essentially assigning it a label when it’s sent rather than when you receive it.
[…] say your address is pinkyrocks@gmail.com, and you want to automatically label all work e-mails. Add a plus sign and a phrase to make it pinkyrocks+work@gmail.com and set up a filter to label it work.
[sigh] I love Gmail.
Gmail does indeed rock, but I seem to remember that this is also an old sendmail trick.
No trick involved.? This has been a part of the standard for @ style addressing forever.
In other words, if you ever have an email provider that doesn’t support + style addressing, they are not following the standards and you should complain.
It won’t get you anywhere, but it might make you feel better.
Really? I’m so not old-school…
This is not a standard. According to RFC 2822, a plus sign is just another allowed character. Some mail servers (sendmail in particular) treat plus just as you say. However, as it’s not a standard no sender should think they know what the plus sign means. Too many reject it because they think it’s not valid — as noted in the wikipedia article Hotmail in particular rejects 14 valid characters! So that makes this trick less useful. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_address