Gmail – Address with Plus Sign in Recipient Name

gmail

I've seen people list email addresses at Gmail with "+" within the recipient name.

Here's an example of what I mean:

recipient+name@gmail.com

That said, if you attempted to create a Gmail account with "+" recipient name, you would get this error message:

Please use only letters (a-z), numbers, and periods.

Is the "+" simply read and removed by the mail server, and if so, is this specific to Gmail, or is it universal to all email addresses/servers? Meaning my guess is that people to this for readability, but I've always been puzzled by it, since it appears to not be possible to create an Gmail account using a "+".

Best Answer

Plus sign is GMail's delimiter for aliases, which many people use for filtering and tracking spam.

For example, you want to make sure that your bank's emails are all legitimate so you'll register your email with the bank as johndoe+mybank@gmail.com and then create a filter that deletes all emails that don't match from:MyBank AND to:johndoe+mybank@gmail.com. Alternatively, when you register with a shady site you can provide your email as johndoe+shadysite@gmail.com and then create a filter to delete everything that is sent to that address.

However, beware that some sites have poorly-written validators on allowed addresses, which block emails with plus sign, which is actually an allowed character per RFC 5322. Google doesn't allow it simply because it's a reserved character in their system.

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