Exclaimer Address Tagging for Exchange overview

We are asked to provide our email address for an array of tasks every day. Whether you're buying products online, signing up for services or just making a general enquiry via a website, you always need to provide a contact email address. The more you use your address, the more messages you receive that need to be managed, and the greater the chance that your address will be sold on or abused in some way.

Email address tagging is a quick, easy way to create any number of temporary, disposable email addresses without any administrative or configuration requirements - you simply add an address tag to your main email address (for example: [email protected]).

Any messages sent to this address will be delivered to your inbox as normal, but by defining rules in your email client, you can handle messages received for each address tag separately (for example, you might direct them to specified mailboxes or folders, apply flags, etc.). Moreover, if you start to receive spam for a particular address, you can easily block the address and report the sender as appropriate.

Email address tagging is widely used in email clients such as Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook.com - now Exclaimer Address Tagging for Exchange brings this functionality to Exchange.

For further information about the principles of address tagging please see the about email address tagging page.

How Exclaimer Address Tagging for Exchange works

By default, Microsoft Exchange does not allow tagged addresses. So (for example), if an email message is sent to [email protected], Exchange simply looks up that address, determines that it can't be found and bounces the message.

Having installed Exclaimer Address Tagging for Exchange, a Transport Agent is installed on the Exchange Server and this implements address tagging. It works as follows:

• The Transport Agent modifies the message envelope for the incoming email message (the message envelope is the part of a message which includes sender and recipient addresses), changing [email protected] to [email protected] before it reaches Exchange.  

• When the message does reach Exchange, it is addressed to [email protected] and is routed to the correct mailbox.

• Crucially, when the Transport Agent modifies the message, it leaves the message headers intact. This means that Exchange routes the message to [email protected] so it is delivered normally; but when Karen opens the message she can still see that it was addressed to [email protected]. With this information she can:

• See which address tag the message was sent to

• Set up an Outlook rule to filter or delete messages sent to this tag (if required)

If required, Karen could request that her tagged address is added to the blocked addresses list in Exclaimer Address Tagging for Exchange by a system administrator. If a tagged address is added to the blocked addresses list, any messages received for that address are ignored by the Transport Agent; as such these messages still have an address tag when they reach Exchange and are bounced back to the sender as unrecognizable.

Exclaimer Address Tagging for Exchange supports the use of + (plus) and -- (double dash) characters to act as delimiters for email address tags.