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Plus signs and dots: free aliases hiding in your own address

October 12, 2026 · 2 min read

Sometimes a disposable inbox is the wrong tool. You want the account to keep working next month, but you would still like to know who sold your address or to filter a noisy shop into its own folder. Your existing address may already do this for free.

Plus addressing

Many providers ignore everything between a + and the @. Mail sent to [email protected] lands in [email protected]'s inbox, with the full address still visible on the message. Gmail and Outlook.com support this, and so do many other providers. Check yours by sending yourself a test.

Uses:

• Filtering. Set a rule that moves anything sent to +bookshop into a folder.
• Leak spotting. If spam arrives at +bookshop, you know where it came from.
• Recovery stays with you. Password resets still reach an inbox only you can open.

Dots in Gmail

For gmail.com addresses, dots in the name are ignored. [email protected] and [email protected] are the same inbox. This is handy to know when a site insists your address "is already registered". It does not apply to most other providers, where a dot is a real character.

The catches

• Some sign-up forms reject the + character outright.
• A sender that knows the trick can simply strip the tag, so it is a filter, not a shield.
• It is still your real inbox: anything you sign up for can reach you until you filter it.

Which one to use