Unable to send to email address with "plus" character using gmail

I'm attempting to forward emails from gmail to a project managed by active.collab. All I need to do to accomplish this is forward my email to an address like notifications+8bgom2idjf@activecollab.com.

This is not the actual email, but the key point is the "+" character. Gmail will let me send the email without issue, but when I look in my sent folder, I see that gmail actually sent this email to notifications@activecollab.com.

I'm guessing this relates to gmail's address alias feature. But I still can't actually get any email delivered to that address.

Does anyone have a suggestion for how I can get gmail to send to the exact email I want, or is this a gmail bug?

Josh Padnick

Posted 2015-11-12T23:37:02.807

Reputation: 111

Does notifications%2B8bgom2idjf@activecollab.com work? Using % and two hex digits instead of a character is the usual way to circumvent parsing problems. – AFH – 2015-11-13T00:01:57.007

Interesting idea! I'll try this and report back. – Josh Padnick – 2015-11-13T00:26:32.103

Relay access denied, so this is a no go. – Josh Padnick – 2015-11-13T00:27:53.067

I got different results depending on whether I was sending or receiving through Gmail, and I hoped it might work in your circumstances. Clearly not. Sorry it didn't work for you. – AFH – 2015-11-13T01:42:51.897

I appreciate the suggestion! – Josh Padnick – 2015-11-13T19:20:02.487

Answers

The issue was that active.collab hosted version does not yet support emailed data, even though they expose this feature in the UI. I've been told it should be added by end of November 2015.

Josh Padnick

Posted 2015-11-12T23:37:02.807

Reputation: 111

Adding the '+' sign to an email address is just a variation of the same email address like the '.' in Gmail accounts.

My bet would be that The mail client is stripping it for display purposes but if you look at the header of the mail you will see that it was sent to the address you typed.

Most people do this for filtering purposes like registering an email of johnsmith+suspectsite@gmail.com and moving messages that match 'sent to' that address to the spam folder.

Be aware that some mail servers will reject this address format as 'Invalid Recipient' or something similar.

Junkiebev

Posted 2015-11-12T23:37:02.807

Reputation: 361

1Good idea to check the original message! I did and I do see that the email is formatted correctly there. So I'll follow up with the active.collab folks. – Josh Padnick – 2015-11-13T00:26:18.223