Having a plus sign in the mail address.

Question

Hi,

It seems like this is not allowed in wikitree. Why? It is very useful for filtering email.

e.g. john90+dna@gmail.com

more info: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2018/12/19/gmail-email-address-tricks/

Comments

It would be nice to be able to do this with WikiTree. Hope you get a positive answer from the tech team.

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There is also an issue on how this character is treated by your email server. It is up to each individual server to process requests, so mary+peter@domain.com could be for the user "mary+peter", not "mary" with a subaddress (tag/filter) of "peter" as Gmail does.

As an example, MS Exchange and MS Office 365 do not currently support subaddressing; although MS Office 365 has it on the Q3 2020 roadmap.

Answer 1

Hi Lovise,

For reference, there is a conversation on StackExchange with the sort of questions we would want to think about. https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/65244/what-are-the-security-reasons-for-disallowing-the-plus-sign-in-email-addresses

We do want to discourage members from signing up for multiple accounts. Intentionally, or accidentally. Members could forget which form of their e-mail address they registered with. We would need to make sure that all of our various usages of e-mail addresses ignore what comes after the plus sign. That would make this a larger task with more potential for unintended consequences without careful debugging.

Chris

Comments

I'm impartial to this question but just want to point out that the link posted by Chris actually supports the use of + signs in email addresses, with four answers stating that there are no important security concerns about the use of + signs and no answers supporting the opposite point of view.

Answer 2

Lovise, I realize that this is not an answer to your question, but it is a way to get to the same result.

You can set up folders in your email program or webmail and also set up "rules" for how incoming email is handled, such as putting messages either from or to a specific address or with specific words in the subject, etc. in a specific folder.