Organizing Your Emails with Plus Addressing
An intern downloading one e-book can flood your inbox with newsletters for months. Here's a simple trick to sort that automatically.
An intern downloads an e-book, someone signs up for a newsletter on a whim, a form gets filled out just to access a free webinar — and just like that, your main inbox slowly turns into a catch-all. It's not a disaster, but it's the kind of clutter that eats up a few minutes every single week. The good news is there's a feature already built into the tools you're using, free, and underused, that solves a good chunk of this without adding new software or new processes. It's called plus addressing.
What plus addressing actually is
Plus addressing is a way to use "tags" to identify and sort your emails as soon as they land in your inbox. The feature is supported in both Microsoft Exchange Online and Gmail — it's enabled by default in Microsoft's environment, which means most organizations running Exchange already have it available with no extra setup required.
In practical terms, if your address is bob@mmotechno.com, you can hand out the address bob+newsletters@mmotechno.com anywhere on the web. The email still lands directly in your inbox, at bob@mmotechno.com. The only difference is that you can now build a rule that catches everything sent to that "plus" address and files it automatically.
Why not just filter by sender
That's the natural question to ask: why not simply build a rule based on who's sending the email? The problem is that a sender-based rule needs to be adjusted every single time a new sender shows up.
Here's a concrete example. You want to filter Groupon offers — you add their address to the rule. A week later you try a meal-kit service like Goodfood and suddenly you're getting a flood of emails — you add another address to the rule. Then you download a free e-book from a site that, of course, asks for your email to unlock it, and that company starts writing to you regularly too. You add yet another address to the rule.
Multiply that by months of normal internet use and you end up with an endless rule to maintain — or worse, an inbox nobody bothers sorting anymore. This is usually the point where people consider creating a second email address just to deal with it, which solves one problem by creating a new thing to manage.
Where plus addressing earns its keep
This is exactly the scenario where plus addressing changes things. On every site where you know you'll get spam or simply a high volume of email, hand out the plus address instead of your main one, and create a single rule that filters everything sent to bob+newsletters@mmotechno.com.
It doesn't matter who sends the message afterward — the rule keeps working. You never have to touch it again just because you gave your email to a new third party. The sorting happens once, at the source, and stays valid for every future use of that plus address.
What to keep in mind before adopting it
As long as you follow the format <original-email>+<tag>@your-domain, the possible combinations are essentially unlimited: an address for prospective client inquiries, one for urgent requests, one for your own personal subscriptions. Each tag can then have its own rule and its own folder.
There are two limitations worth knowing about, though. First, some web forms don't support the "+" character in the email field and will simply reject the plus address — in that case, you'll need to fall back to the standard address for that particular site. Second, you generally can't unsubscribe from a service directly through a plus address; unsubscribing sometimes has to happen through the main address or a specific link in the email you received.
A small feature, a real time saver
Plus addressing won't fix every inbox organization problem, but it's the kind of simple adjustment that, once in place, keeps quietly paying off without you having to think about it. That's very much the approach MMO Techno takes with clients: finding the small tweaks that genuinely simplify day-to-day work, before even talking about new tools or bigger projects. If your Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace environment could use a look like this, our team is glad to talk it through.