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I was looking on a person's resume and he has put his email like this: foo+resume@gmail.com.

I am talking about that additional +resume.

I want to know:

  1. How these type of email works?
  2. How do I create email like that with my present Gmail address?

Additionally I tried creating an email address with + in between, but gmail only allows letters, numbers and periods.

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Could it be that he/she wanted to prevent bots from detecting it as an e-mail? As in mefoo (at) provider.com. – Jacob Jan Tuinstra Jan 13 at 8:24
@JacobJanTuinstra Send an email at team+webapps@stackexchange.com and you'll receive a reply. – Santosh Kumar Jan 13 at 8:28
This wiki says it's possible: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Valid_email_addresses. I guess it's a Gmail policy. I just tried to create a test+test@gmail.com, but it showed an error – Jacob Jan Tuinstra Jan 13 at 8:30
This make a great way to filter and label incoming email. Any email with that +keyword must have found my email on that job search site. – mhoran_psprep Jan 13 at 14:28

1 Answer

up vote 8 down vote accepted

Anything after the + sign in the email prefix is generally ignored by mail servers and resolves and sends to the address without the [+word]. It's a way to easily track who sends you email.

In your example, foo@gmail.com would receive the email, and "+resume" would be ignored, but the recipient (foo@gmail.com) will receive an email with foo+resume@gmail.com in the recipient (TO) list.

See Gmail reference: Using an address alias

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You can't create an account as such. It must be an alias. – Jacob Jan Tuinstra Jan 13 at 8:39
@MacGyver Got it. – Santosh Kumar Jan 13 at 8:43
It works with virtually all email addresses/providers as well, not only Gmail – bungeshea Jan 20 at 3:09
@SantoshKumar You should probably also know that while this is part of the email standard and a great technique, you'll still receive an "invalid email" in a fair amount of web applications. – Alpha Jan 20 at 14:36

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