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Gmail has this feature where appending a plus ("+") sign or a dot to an email address will still have it sent to the same address. This makes it easier to filter emails sent to you, by checking which email address the email was sent to and then label, star or auto-delete emails based on that.

Yahoo! mail also has a similar feature: Address Guard, which uses the dash ("-") sign.

Does Hotmail or Outlook.com have a similar feature? If yes, how does it work?

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    That's not really a Gmail feature. It's simply a relatively old RFC specification for email. That not all clients support it is an issue with those clients, not a special feature of Gmail or Outlook.com.
    – ale
    Sep 18, 2016 at 16:28
  • @Aʟᴇ: By client you mean server...?
    – user541686
    Dec 5, 2016 at 4:06
  • @Mehrdad I suppose I did, but perhaps "service" would have been a better word choice.
    – ale
    Dec 5, 2016 at 12:25
  • This question has answers here: serverfault.com/questions/121289/…
    – AutoBaker
    Oct 15, 2020 at 11:27

2 Answers 2

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Does Hotmail or Outlook.com have a similar feature?

Yes, Outlook.com has that feature as of this week.

If yes, how does it work?

This blog article explains how it works. It works the same as with Gmail.

Example

Say your email address is [email protected]. You can add something with a plus + sign. So, sending an email to [email protected] will still be delivered to [email protected].

Then you can create a rule with, for example, the filter To-line contains [email protected] and redirect those emails to another folder.

outlook create rule Image source: http://www.ghacks.net/2013/09/17/can-now-use-email-aliases-outlook-com

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    ... but Outlook in general does not (just tried it).
    – MGOwen
    Jul 23, 2015 at 7:24
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    and what about hotmail.com domain? the same feature is also activated for that domain or only outlook.com support it?
    – рüффп
    Nov 15, 2017 at 10:21
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    I have a Hotmail.com email address and i have used it multiple times with the plus sign. I can confirm that it works
    – zeta
    Jul 14, 2020 at 7:54
  • Does a dot work in the subaddress for Hotmail? E.g. [email protected]
    – Dennis
    Dec 22, 2022 at 18:18
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Outlook.com allows the creation of email aliases, which is essentially the same as the Gmail and Yahoo features that you mention. Email sent to your aliases will forward to your regular Outlook.com account.

Outlook.com does have limits, though: you can only create up to 5 aliases per year, and you can have a maximum of 15 aliases in total.

Here is the link to the "Create an email alias" page.

And here are some links where you can read more about using Outlook aliases:

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    This is hardly the same thing as gmail plus addressing. With gmail and other services (I use SmarterMail on my dedicated server), I can write for example [email protected] and essentially provide unique emails for each service I sugnup for. With outlook alias I would have to manually create an alias (and there's a maximum limit) so this is not even comparable.
    – smartins
    Sep 14, 2013 at 14:54
  • This answers only part of the question. What about the same support for hotmail.com addresses? For example [email protected] seems to be refused (this is a fake address, but just to mention the pattern) by an outlook.com server.
    – рüффп
    Nov 15, 2017 at 10:20

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