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anes
anes

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Creating multiple accounts with one E-Mail address

The problem

When I was coding my first twitter bot, I ran into a major issue: I needed to register a new account for the bot, which required me to provide a unique email address.
There was one big issue with that: I had the intention of making multiple bots, just to test the capabilities of the twitter API.
I quickly realized that creating a new email for everyone of those would be really cumbersome and unmanageable after a while.

Making use of "Address Aliasing"

I quickly found out about a neat little trick called "address aliasing". What it does is, allow you to add a "tag" to your email address, without actually changing it.
For Gmail and many other services you simply add a plus sign (+) right before the at (@) and add some text between the plus and at.
That could look as follows:
some.example@gmail.com --> some.example+devto@gmail.com
And that's also what I did for my bot account.

Important things to keep in mind

  1. If you are using a different provider than Gmail, there may be a different syntax for doing this.
  2. It won't work for all services, as some built tag checks into their uniqueness check. For me it has worked everywhere I used it.

Top comments (4)

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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel ๐Ÿ•ต๐Ÿปโ€โ™‚๏ธ Fayard • Edited

Are there other Email providers who support this username+whatever@example.com feature?

I give this advice very often and feel bad when people don't use Gmail. Gmail being the market leder, it would be surprising that nobody copy this trick.

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aneshodza profile image
anes

From what I have found, at least outlook and icloud support this feature. I think you can just search for "plus addressing ", it should pretty quickly give you an answer.

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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel ๐Ÿ•ต๐Ÿปโ€โ™‚๏ธ Fayard

Thanks that's exactly what I was loooking for

Subadressing: Addresses of the form something-filter@example.com, using various separators between the base name and the tag, are supported by several email services, including Andrew Project (plus),[16] Runbox (plus), Gmail (plus),[17] Rackspace (plus), Yahoo! Mail Plus (hyphen),[18] Apple's iCloud (plus), Outlook.com (plus),[19] Proton Mail (plus),[20] Fastmail (plus and Subdomain Addressing),[21] postale.io (plus),[22] Pobox (plus),[23] MeMail (plus),[24] MMDF (equals), Qmail and Courier Mail Server (hyphen).[25][26] Postfix and Exim allow configuring an arbitrary separator from the legal character set.[27][28]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_addres...

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meritonaliu profile image
MeritonAliu

Also nice to mention is that gmails are ignoring dots "." inside the username of the email. For example yourname@gmail.com is the same adress as yo.urn.am.e@gmail.com in gmail, but for third party auth its a new mail.