Symbolic Subaddressing

Created by Alice Joynson-Ellis, Modified on Sat, 9 Aug at 3:14 PM by Alice Joynson-Ellis

Symbolic subaddressing is a feature that we use here at Purelymail. It is designed as a method to allow you more customization and easier to use email addresses for just one account! It specifically works by allowing you to extend your email with a symbol (typically a + sign), and then a tag or keyword.

How does it work?

Symbolic subaddressing works by allowing you to extend your email. When the email hits our servers (by the domain name), we will then look at that email address, and provided you have this feature enabled for your domain (default is enabled), then we will split the email address with any common symbols, and check if the first part matches a user account. From there, we route that email to the user who the first section belongs to.

Say for example you have the email user@domain.com. You might want to sort your emails so you know when your getting emails from people who are family and friends. Using symbolic subaddressing, you can give them the email user+familyandfriends@domain.com. This can be a particularly useful feature to have if you are also using Sieve scripts, since you can then sort things specifically into folders depending on who you gave the email to.

Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
You can do more advanced filtering in your inbox if you require it using automation like Sieve scripts.	You loose the ability to have characters in your email names
You can give services individual emails with their own tags, so if the email gets shared anywhere, you are more likely to know where it came from.	It can get confusing remembering which email you used to sign up for which service
If your password ever gets on a breached list, you can find out where it came from	Certain websites and services block symbolic subaddressing

So as you can see, there are both the many benefits and drawbacks to using it. If you do decide that it is something that you aren't interested in using for your account, then you can head to the Domain tab at the top of the account page, select the domain you want to disable it for, and you should be able to disable it from there. This will bring back the functionality where you can have symbols in the name, but you will also loose the ability to have tags in the email, especially if you have given it out with them. These services with the symbolic address after you have disabled it won't be able to send emails to you.