Using Plus(+) Tag Subaddressing to respond with Thunderbird

So I unintentionally signed up for a group using a plus tag in my email address.

Most email servers* will allow a plus(+) suffix in your email address to help filter certain emails. An example of this would be foo+bar@myemailserver.com. This convention is also known as ‘subaddressing’, ‘plus-style addressing’, or ‘detailed addressing’. http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5233 for the tech-minded.

This is highly useful if you have multiple subscriptions that you’d like to manage using filters. For instance, if you have a google groups subscription that you’d like to go to a special folder, you could use a plus tag in your email address like benny+google_groups@myemailserver.com. From there, you can take advantage of your email clients filter features to sort emails from the group into a separate folder.

So in any case, I ran into a situation where I needed to respond with a subaddressed email in order to unsubscribe. I use Mozilla’s Thunderbird as my email client. So when trying to reply to the unsubscribe link, all I got in the From field was my proper email address. And of course, you can only select from a list of registered email addresses within Thunderbird. What to do?

Failing to find the right words to properly search for a solution, I turned to some of my more techy friends. I decided to post my findings here.

Right-click on your account and select “Settings”:

This will open your Account Settings. From there, all you have to do is edit your email address by adding the subaddress:

Click “OK” to save the new settings. From there, just open a new email as usual. You’ll find that the subaddressed email is now available:

This can obviously be used to correspond from that email address as well as use it for subscription revocation.

To get your regular email address back, just repeat the process above and remove the subaddressing.

That’s it! Hope this helps.

_{*Notably, Office 365 does not support subaddressing.}