Microsoft: Disposable Emails Now Available In Exchange Online

Microsoft says that Office 365 customers can use unlimited disposable recipient email addresses after the Plus Addressing feature rolled out to all Exchange Online users.

Plus addressing (also known as subaddressing or detailed addressing) allows users to create an indefinite number of custom and unique email addresses by adding suffix text strings to their standard address using a ‘+’ delimiter.

Exchange Online support for plus addressing was first announced by the company during Microsoft Ignite 2019 and roll out started in September 2020. BleepingComputer reported in July that the planned release date was set for Q3 2020.

Before being added as a default Office 365 tenant admin feature, plus addressing was one of the most voted requests for Exchange Admins according to Microsoft’s UserVoice site.

If plus addressing looks familiar, Gmail provides it for while now and it explained back in 2008 how this feature can give users better control over their mail inboxes.

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Useful for filtering and tracking email sources

All emails received using the new dynamically created email addresses in the username+suffix@domain form will automatically be redirected to the users’ inboxes.

“For example, a plus address for kimakers@contoso.com could be something like kimakers+northwind@contoso.com that she could use to sign up for the newsletter at the Northwind web site,” Microsoft explained in a roadmap entry.

“Then when Northwind sends a newsletter to kimakers+northwind@contoso.com it will route directly to kimakers@contoso.com. Kim could create an Inbox rule that then moves messages sent to this + address into the “Northwind” folder.”

Among the possible uses of this feature, Microsoft mentions the possibility to filter incoming emails and to keep track of marketing or sales campaigns:

• Some customers want to filter incoming email and move certain messages to their own folders.

• Other customers have business solutions (such as support ticketing systems) that add a case ID to an email address to help track support threads.

This makes it very easy to find from where a spam campaign got your email, as well to automatically organize emails based on their sender.

Enabling disposable email support

Plus addressing support is disabled by default in Exchange Online organizations, however, admins can easily toggle it on using Exchange Online PowerShell.

To do that they will have to go through the following procedure:

1. Connect to Exchange Online PowerShell.
2. To enable plus addressing in your organization, run the following PowerShell command: Set-OrganizationConfig -AllowPlusAddressInRecipients $true

“Support is currently scoped to mailboxes with support for distribution lists and Groups expected in December 2020,” Microsoft added earlier today.

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