Last year, we shared “7 Ways We’ve Improved Email Hosting on cPanel & WHM” and we looked at some cool features for email accounts. After much improvement, we felt that Plus Addressing was an interesting enough feature to include as a blog post! 

So what is plus addressing?

Known officially as subaddressing, plus addressing delivers mail in a particular way so that you can better organize incoming mail. Additionally, plus addressing is used as a method to spot if a company is selling your email address without your permission. The format for plus addressing is username+word@domain.tld. For example, if my email address is John@example.com, a plus addressing version of the address may be John+list@example.com. 

Notice the “+” symbol and the word “list” that follows “John”: the email software recognizes this format and delivers emails addressed to John+list@example.com to the “list” folder.

When would I use Plus Addressing?

For example, if I were to sign up for cPanel’s Events Mailing List, I could create an email address formatted like John+cpevents@example.com. When I receive an email from that company, my server will place that message in the mailbox folder called “list” automatically. Any emails that I get from that company addressed to John+list@example.com will go straight into that folder, instead of cluttering up my inbox. Yay—organization! 

So how would I spot if a company was selling my email address without my permission? 

So if you’ve signed up for a mailing list for a company using a plus addressing email address, mail from that company should be delivered to the appended +folder location. If for any reason you see unsolicited emails to your plus addressing email address, then you know that email has been resold. Adding a +folder appending to your email account allows you to easily spot unsolicited mass email and unsubscribe (or report) those bad actors.

Can I use this right now!?!

This feature was introduced in cPanel & WHM Version 58, so as long as you’re running a supported version of our software, this feature is available to you! If you have any further questions, suggestions on how to use plus addressing to your advantage, or want to discuss further, please join our official Slack or Discord channels, or join our official cPanel subreddit!