How to Use Plus Addressing in Gmail to Organize Your Inbox

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A simple way to filter and sort emails in Gmail

Written by Hannah Dillon

Last Updated: August 6, 2025 Fact Checked

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What is plus addressing?

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Using Plus Addressing

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Why It's Helpful

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Video

A great way to filter incoming messages is to use plus addressing in Gmail. You can also use plus addressing if you are required to enter your email on a site you are afraid might sell your email to other companies. For example, if you sign up for a store's email list using the address [your user name]+[store name]@gmail.com and start getting spam to that address, you'll know that store is the reason. Read on to learn everything you need to know about plus addressing in Gmail, including how to set it up and create email filters for your plus aliases.

Gmail Plus Addressing Overview

Plus addressing lets you make Gmail aliases without having to create new accounts. You can make a plus address by adding a "+" and a word or phrase between your username and "@gmail.com." You can use plus addressing to filter incoming emails and find out if a particular website is sending you spam.

Section 1 of 3:

What is plus addressing?

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Plus addressing in Gmail allows you to make email aliases easily. An email alias is a separate email that automatically forwards emails to your main email inbox. Normally, you'd have to set up a separate email alias by creating a new email address, but with plus addressing, you can create email aliases on the fly by adding a plus (+) and additional characters between your username and "@gmail.com."^{[1]
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- For example, if your email address is "yourname@gmail.com," you could create an alias with plus addressing that looks like yourname+facebook@gmail.com.

Section 2 of 3:

How to Use Plus Addressing

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Go to the site you want to use your email alias on. This could be a social media site (such as Facebook or X), an e-commerce website (such as eBay or Mercari), or just about any site where you need to put in your email address to sign up or get emails in some way.
- You can also use plus addressing when you're asked to provide an email address in a physical store to receive a receipt or special promotions.
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Enter your email with the plus address alias. Type in your email address when prompted, but add a plus sign and an alias before you type the "@". For example, if you want to make an alias for all emails from Facebook, sign up to Facebook with the email address yourname+facebook@gmail.com.
- You must still use your username (the beginning of your @gmail.com email address) before the "+alias" part.
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Create a label in Gmail. If you want to automatically filter incoming messages sent to your plus address to a specific folder/label, it's easy. First, you'll want to create a label for the alias. You can only create labels on the Gmail website; you cannot use the mobile app to complete this step. To do this, follow these steps:
- Click the cogwheel icon in the upper-right corner, then click See all settings.
- Click Labels.
- Click Create new label.
- Type the name of your label in the first text field.
- Nest the label under another label, if desired.
- Click Create to finish making the label.
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Create a filter for the new label. Now that you have a label, you will need to create a filter that tells Gmail to assign that label to incoming messages sent to your plus alias address. You must use Gmail on a computer to do this–it won't work in the mobile app. You can do this by following these steps:
- Click the cogwheel icon in the upper-right corner, then click See all settings.
- Click Filters and Blocked Addresses.
- Click Create a new filter.
- Next to the "To:" label, type the plus address alias you created in Step 2.
- Click Create filter.
- Click the checkbox next to "Apply the label."
- Choose the label you created in Step 3.
- Click Create filter.

Section 3 of 3:

Reasons to Use Plus Addressing

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If you are getting a lot of unwanted emails, you can use plus addressing to figure out which website is sending you those emails. You can even use this method to figure out which sites sell your data, since they'd sell your email alias to a data broker, who will then sell that data to advertisers.
You can use the plus addressing method to easily sort the emails in your inbox into folders based on what website they came from. This will help keep your email more tidy and organized, and you can easily delete entire folders of messages without worrying about deleting something important.^{[2]
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