Whether you are an individual or a business, managing and optimising your inbox can sometimes be tedious. Between promotional emails, spam, newsletters, banking transaction confirmations and alert notifications, your mailbox can quickly turn into a jungle and navigating through it becomes a real challenge. Faced with this flood of messages, the Plus Addressing method offers a way to simplify email organisation, save time and regain control of your inbox.
How does Plus Addressing work?
Definition of Plus Addressing
Plus Addressing is a technique that allows you to create variations of your main email address by adding a suffix using the “+” sign, followed by your chosen text and placed before the “@” symbol.
For example, if your email address is firstname.lastname@example.com, you can create variations such as:
- firstname.lastname+newsletters@example.com for newsletter subscriptions
- firstname.lastname+advertising@example.com for offers and promotions
- firstname.lastname+nextflicks@example.com for a specific service
You can create as many variations as you like. These variations are treated exactly like your main email address: all messages sent to them will arrive in your usual inbox.
Plus Addressing works without any special setup. When registering for an online service, simply write the desired variation of your email address, such as firstname.lastname+nextflicks@example.com when signing up, or firstname.lastname+bank@example.com for setting up your online banking account, for example.
This feature is supported by many email providers, such as Gmail and Outlook. At Netim, we also offer Plus Addressing as part of all our email hosting plans.
It is also important to note that Plus Addressing is a server-side feature (managed by email providers). Therefore, email clients (the apps or software used to read emails) have no direct impact on the support for Plus Addressing, as long as the email provider itself supports it.
Plus Addressing vs Alias vs Redirections: What are the differences?
Although redirects, aliases and Plus Addressing are all alternative methods for better organisation, they function in different ways.
- Plus Addressing allows you to dynamically modify an existing email address by adding a suffix as needed. These addresses don’t require any prior email configuration and are quick to set up. They can only be used to receive messages, not to send them: ideal for organising incoming emails.
Example: firstname.lastname+newsletter@example.com - Aliases, on their side, are separate addresses associated with your main inbox. They can be used as distinct senders but need to be configured in advance within your email provider’s settings. Aliases are better suited for more complex or professional needs.
Example: contact@company.com could be an alias for name@company.com - Redirects, as the name suggests, are used to automatically forward messages sent to one email address to another. The destination and redirected email addresses must already have been created before you can set up this feature in your email provider’s settings.
Example: you can redirect messages sent to name@example.com to the address name@company.com
What are the benefits of Plus Addressing?
As mentioned in the introduction, Plus Addressing is a method designed to simplify the management of your email. Let’s take a closer look at the advantages of Plus Addressing, why and how you should use it.
Optimised organisation with automated filters
Plus Addressing makes it much easier to categorise your emails using dedicated filters.
Let’s say you want to create a “Newsletters” folder in your inbox. You can then apply a filter to your address firstname.lastname+newsletters@example.com to automatically sort all messages sent to that address into the “Newsletters” folder. Similarly, you can create folders like “Promos”, “Banking”, “ProjectA”, “EventB”, etc… And so on, organising your emails according to specific categories.
So why not just filter senders?
Filtering by senders can quickly become tedious and imprecise: you need to update your filter rule every time you sign up for a new service or receive an email from a new sender. Similarly, a business may use several different email addresses (for example, support@company.com, news@company.com, or promotions@company.com) and each one must be manually added to your filter rules. Moreover, some companies might change their sending addresses, making your filters obsolete or ineffective.
With Plus Addressing, however, filtering is much more efficient and saves you a considerable amount of time, as you are essentially filtering even before receiving an email!
Easier follow-up on responses
If your work involves tracking cases with clients, suppliers, or simply managing customer support, Plus Addressing can be extremely helpful.
By creating folders related to specific topics in your inbox and associating them with a custom address and filter rule, such as: company+client456@example.com or company+ticket123@example.com, you can automatically sort and track all emails related to that particular case. This makes follow-ups much more organised and efficient, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.
Identifying sales or data leaks
We have all experienced it: receiving emails from senders to whom we never provided our email address. Thanks to Plus Addressing, you can now easily identify where that unsolicited email came from, whether it is from a company that was hacked or one that sold your data.
By using unique addresses for each service or subscription, you can quickly detect data leaks or sales. For example, let’s say you signed up for Nextflicks with firstname.lastname+nextflicks@example.com, for Fpotifly with firstname.lastname+fpotifly@example.com and so on for all your services.
If you receive an email at the specific address firstname.lastname+nextflicks@example.com and it is not from Nextflicks, you will be able to immediately pinpoint which service shared your information. This allows you to take the necessary steps to protect your privacy.
- At Netim, we understand the importance of optimal inbox management. That’s why Plus Addressing is fully supported in our email hosting solutions.
- Combined with our high-performance email service, Plus Addressing and other email tools such as redirects, filters and automatic rules will help you save valuable time in managing your daily emails!
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