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

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, 2013 at 8:24
  • @JacobJanTuinstra Send an email at team+webapps@stackexchange.com and you'll receive a reply.
    – Santosh Kumar
    Jan 13, 2013 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, 2013 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, 2013 at 14:28

1 Answer 1

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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, 2013 at 8:39
  • @MacGyver Got it.
    – Santosh Kumar
    Jan 13, 2013 at 8:43
  • It works with virtually all email addresses/providers as well, not only Gmail
    – shea
    Jan 20, 2013 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, 2013 at 14:36

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