The “Secret” to Limitless Email Addresses

The journey of creating a thousand email addresses begins with testing a single sign-up process

In the world of digital analytics, testing is probably the second most time-consuming task, other than reading documentation and forums. During my normal work, I am constantly going through sign-ups and customer flows dozens of times to identify problems or test solutions. The problem with testing these processes is that pretty much all of them need a unique email address to complete each signup. Historically my go-to solution for this problem was to create several different email accounts to give me more opportunities to go through these processes. This messy, unorganized “solution” sometimes required me to look through several email accounts to find the correct one that I used on a specific site. It was far from what I would call optimal and needlessly wasted time and effort.  Then I remembered an old trick from my poor college student days of abusing limitless free trials, subaddressing.

What is subaddressing, also known as plus addressing, tagged addressing, or mail extensions? It is a tagging system supported by many mail services to create multiple aliases for a single email address. This is primarily used to filter or to create single-use email addresses. An email address is made up of two parts, local and domain. The local part is what identifies the specific address within a domain and the domain is the actual email hostname.

What subaddressing does is add an identifier between the local-part and the domain that will not affect the destination of the email. Think of it as a UTM parameter. It provides information to the destination without affecting behavior.

Both Jerrin@CollabQor.com and Jerrin+Testing@Collabqor.com will go to the same inbox but the recipient’s name will be different. You can use this to create a filtering rule within your email to automatically move any email address containing that tag to go to a special folder. Thus, eliminating clutter in your inbox.

I recommend using a consistent naming convention for your tags to help with organization. In my practice, I will use a client name in the email tag along with an iteration number and the word “test”. For example, if I am working with a client named FakeClient,  I can use Jerrin+testFakeClient1@Collabqor.com followed by Jerrin+testFakeClient2@Collabqor.com and so forth. In this case, my rule in outlook will find the string “+test” and automatically redirect it to a folder named “Testing”.

 Keep in mind that although the technique works the vast majority of the time, some websites will consider email addresses with the “+” character as invalid. For those, you will need to use separate real email addresses for each attempt.

While this capability is already built into many of the mainstream email services, some use alternate separators (listed below) or will require your email service admin to turn it on. If your current email service does not support subaddressing or requires significant setup, I have found that the easiest solution is simply to just create a general testing email address in Gmail since subaddressing is automatically available.

Additional notes:

·         Learn how to setup subaddressing in Exchange Online here

·         Alternate subaddressing separators