Support Start > Email > Advanced Email Questions > Plus Addresses

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One reason people use the catch-all address is that it lets them give a different tagged address to each company they deal with, without having to add each address in our control panel.

Tagged addresses have several advantages — in particular, if you order something from a company you’ve never dealt with before, and you’re worried that they’ll sell your address to spammers, you can give that company a unique address that you can later disable.

Using the catch-all address has a drawback, though. It makes every address at your domain name valid, so spammers can simply make up random addresses and deliver mail to you. It usually means you’ll get a lot more spam.

To avoid this problem, our mail servers also support tagged addresses using “plus addressing”. You can add a plus sign and any text you want to the first part of your real address, and it will still be delivered to you.

For example, if your real address is address@example.com, you can give other companies addresses that look like this when they ask for it:

• address+amazon@example.com
• address+ebay.com@example.com
• address+somebody@example.com

You don’t need to add these addresses in our control panel in advance. As long as address@example.com already exists, these kind of addresses automatically work.

What if I want to block a tagged address later?

You can block an address at any time by adding the full address, including the plus part, in our control panel, and following our normal instructions to block it.

For example, if you add address+somebody@example.com and set it to forward to reject@tigertech.net, it will no longer accept mail.

You can also treat plus addresses specially in sieve filters.

Can I use plus addressing with forwarded mail?

You should probably only use plus addressing with mailbox addresses.

If you use plus addressing while forwarding your mail to another company, the extra part is also added to the forwarding, which may or may not be desirable.

For example, if you forward address@example.com mail to address@gmail.com, mail sent to address+amazon@example.com would be forwarded to address+amazon@gmail.com. This actually works properly with Gmail, but it doesn’t work with many other companies. If you forward mail to other companies, be sure to check that they also accept mail using plus addresses.