Email Plus Addressing

Email Plus Addressing allows you to sort your emails into folders from different sources. How it does this is simple and easy to use. Here is a guide on what Email Plus Addressing is and how you can use it to keep your emails organized.

What is Email Plus Addressing?

The answer is simple. It is a method of sorting your incoming emails into folders for organizing your emails. You can sort your incoming emails by creating filters in your email client, but if you have several devices that you use to check your email, you would need set these filters on all of them. Plus Addressing works on the mail server level and will sort your mail before the mail clients see them.

And the best part is it is installed and activated in cPanel by default. And not just cPanel, most large email providers support plus addressing, including Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo.

How does Email Plus Addressing work?

How you use plus addressing is right in the name. When your mail server receives an email with a “+” in the address, it will deliver it to the mailbox before the plus symbol and into a folder named whatever is after it. You can use these plus addresses when signing up for services to have any communications filtered into IMAP folders instead of the all getting dumped into your inbox.

For example, if your email is mail@example.com, and you want all of your Amazon notifications to be sorted into a folder named “amazon”, you can update your email with Amazon to mail+amazon@example.com. Now, any mail that is sent to that address will be in the mail@example.com mailbox in the amazon folder and not in your inbox.

mail+amazon@example.com -> mail@example.com, amazon folder

Now, you can see how this can useful. You could set up a different folder for each account that you have to keep them sorted. Newsletters, invoices, notifications or receipts? They can all be sorted to their own folders. You don’t even need to create the IMAP folders, cPanel will create them for you.

Another good use of plus addressing is to help protect your online data. In this day and age, keeping your information private is a full time job. Every time you attach your email to an account, there is a risk that that company will sell your information to someone else. And then the spam starts. But, how can you tell which company sold your information?

Well, if you provide a plus address to each account, you can easily tell who sold you out. If you sign up for a service using the address mail+sketchy@example.com, and shortly after you notice that that folder is getting flooded with spam, you would be safe to assume that service sold your information.

What else should I know about Email Plus Addressing?

There are some of the limitations of plus addressing that you should know about.

One is that you need to use IMAP for all your devices, as POP accounts are only able to access the inbox and not any of the folders. While this is not a large issue, it may mean that you need to remove your POP account from your device and set up as IMAP.

Also, depending on what mail client you are using, all of your IMAP folders may not show up by default (Editor’s Note: I’m looking at you ThunderBird).  This is an easy fix, typically. A quick google search for your mail client will point you in the right direction.

Another issue is some online services will not accept an email address with a “+” in it. This is becoming less of an issue as plus addressing is more widely used, but there is a chance that you may run into this issue.

That being said, you should give it a try. If you use your email for many different services, you will no doubt appreciate the organization that it provides.

If you are still having issues, and need further support, please reach out to our support team using any of these methods.

Recent Articles

What is Cloud Hosting

You probably have heard a lot of buzz around the internet about "the cloud". But what is the cloud that everyone is so excited about, and what does it have to do with your [...]