Plus Addressing: The hack to unlimited email addresses

Have you ever wondered how your inbox gets cluttered with spam emails when you don’t remember giving your mail ID to the spam senders? I started having this thought after creating my first mail ID. I started getting random emails out of the blue. It was amusing at first and soon became an annoyance. My email inbox is still very cluttered. I wish I had known about email plus addressing earlier to maintain my inbox.

Plus Addressing

What is it?

Plus addressing or sub-addressing is an industry-defined way to support dynamic, disposable recipient email addresses.

The above is the actual definition of the term. But in simple terms, it is a way to have multiple temporary email addresses that maps to your mail inbox. To create a subaddress, add a + sign and a tag before the @domain.com part of your mail address.

For example, if your mail ID is robertkiyosaki@gmail.com, you can append the mail ID with +<some_tag> while registering somewhere online. Mails sent to this sub-address will be sent to the actual mail address by the email service provider. So if they send a mail to robertkiyosaki+pinterest@gmail.com, your mail inbox will receive the mail but with the recipient address as the subaddress.

What can it be used for?

This feature can be used to subscribe to different services online like newsletters, or to create accounts. This way, you will know who sold your data to the spammers. There is an industry revolving around this data matching where companies match their users’ addresses to see which user uses which services. Adding more subaddresses will not prevent your data from being stolen, but it will make their jobs harder to some extent.

Sub-addressing can also be helpful in keeping your inbox clutter-free. You can search for the recipient address as the subaddress and remove every mail to that address while housekeeping your inbox.

It also allows you to add a virtual classification of the online services you are subscribed to.

Does this mean you can create infinite subaddresses you can use?

Well, yes. You can create any number of unique subaddresses that you can use to sign up on all the websites. But most online services implement precautions to prevent you from creating infinite accounts using this subaddressing. They keep a trimmed version of your subaddress in their database and match your new subaddress with it. This way, you can still use the subaddressing feature without exploiting it.

Is it secure?

Creating subaddresses doesn’t guarantee online privacy since anyone who receives the subaddress can get the actual mail address by trimming off the tag part and using it for spam or phishing campaigns or to match with other data breaches. So it doesn’t provide the same privacy you get when creating a separate email account for your subscriptions.

But when you use this to create accounts with the subaddress, it will not change to the actual mail address. So hackers will now need to know both the password and the subaddress you used to create an account to hack it.

There is this problem of remembering all the subaddresses you use to log in to different services. You can always use a password manager to store them.

Conclusion

Email sub addressing is a simple but helpful feature everyone should use to add an extra layer of security to your online privacy.