What's the correct terminology for + email alias?

I'm trying to find a email host that supports aliases in the form of [email protected] that will automatically send to [email protected]. I know that Google Apps and Office365 both seem to support this, but for personal use, I'm trying to find a cheaper, optimally free, solution. However, I'm trying to find the correct terminology for this type of alias so that I can search for it instead of emailing every potential host with examples of the type of alias I'm looking for.

Is there a specific term for this? Google's page on this seems to be very generic and doesn't really help when I try to search for an alternative.

Solution 1:

###What's the correct terminology for + email alias?

It has a variety of names, including Sub-addressing, Detailed Addressing or SMTP Tags.

RFC 5233 - Sieve Email Filtering: Subaddress Extension:

Abstract

On email systems that allow for 'subaddressing' or 'detailed addressing' (e.g., "[email protected]"), it is sometimes desirable to make comparisons against these sub-parts of addresses. This document defines an extension to the Sieve Email Filtering Language that allows users to compare against the user and detail sub-parts of an address.

###Sub-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 [email protected] denotes the same delivery address as [email protected]. The text of the tag may be used to apply filtering, or to create single-use addresses.

Some IETF standards-track documents, such as RFC 5233, refer to this convention as sub-addressing. However, the automatic form validation of many web sites rejects + as a valid character in the email address.

Some service providers are inconsistent, and use address tags in their own outbound email, but disallow address tags for users.

Disposable email addresses of this form, using various separators between the base name and the tag, are supported by several email services, including Runbox (plus), Gmail (plus), Yahoo! Mail Plus (hyphen), Apple's iCloud (plus), Outlook.com (plus), FastMail (plus and Subdomain Addressing), and MMDF (equals).

Most installations of the qmail and Courier Mail Server products support the use of a hyphen - as a separator within the local-part, such as [email protected] or [email protected]. This allows qmail through .qmail-default or .qmail-tag-sub-anything-else files to sort, filter, forward, or run an application based on the tagging system established.

Postfix allows configuring an arbitrary separator from the legal character set. The separator info remains available on the email (address is not rewritten to remove it), and thus is useful in internal mail-routing, filtering, and forwarding via any of the mechanisms existing in Postfix.

Source Email address

Solution 2:

I don't know that there's a single standard name for it; I've seen different email programs/services refer to it by different names. The most common ones I've seen are: - Plus-addressing - Sub-addressing - Address tags

The 1st is probably the oldest (in my experience), and what I still refer to it as; the last seems to be more in vogue now.