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I know with gmail you can have people email you at your email with a +sometext appended to the end of your email and you will receive the email as if it were sent to your normal email. For example, if your email is:

joeshmo@gmail.com

I can email

joeshmo+hello@gmail.com

and joeshmo@gmail.com will receive the email.

Is this a standard for email or only a feature of a few email clients? I'm writing a script that signs up users for an account on a website, and I want that script to work for users who already have an account on said website. My plan is to sign them up with 

theiremail+mypersonaltag@theirdomain.com

Thanks for the help.

rmunn
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WillHaack
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2 Answers2

4

It's a defacto standard that has been around for at least 25 years. However while most email systems will honor the user+tag convention, I am not aware of any RFC that dictates they must honor it.

On the other hand, I'm not aware of any email system where this doesn't work. I'm sure there are some.

Fred the Magic Wonder Dog
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3

Qmail uses the negative sign instead of + to similar effect.

Meetup blocks the + sign all together, stating their reasoning as spam control.. https://mobile.twitter.com/meetup_support/status/499291392649080832

You can read more about this in RFC822 http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc822/ and RFC5322 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5322#section-3.2

Community
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davidcondrey
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