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I've been seeing email that's not directly addressed to me land up in my inbox.

My email is something@domain.com, the emails that are delivered are like something+anything@domain.com. After seeing these, I tried other suffixes after the + symbol and all of them land up in my inbox. Does anyone know why that is the case? What happens if someone else registers one of the addresses like something+1@domain.com.

I saw this reliably work for both gmail and outlook, I'm curious to know why that is the case? Is there is a technical reason why mailservers drop off these suffixes.

I'm not sure if StackOverflow is the best place for this question, please move this to another site on the network which may be a better fit if that is the case.

nikhil
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This is called sub-addressing. + part is treated for filtering and all.You can read about it on wiki with page title Email Address.

Also known as plus addressing ortagged addressing. Some mail services support a tag appended to the local part, such that the modified address is an alias to the unmodified address. For example, the address joeuser+tag@example.com denotes the same delivery address asjoeuser@example.com. 

Tyagi Akhilesh
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