Some public programs serve users who do not have access to an email account but want to participate in vanpooling and carpooling. You can create and manage these users, and assist them with matching by using plus addressing and a single shared email inbox owned by your team.
This strategy will allow you to create multiple user accounts for users who need them with real email addresses so you can receive and follow up on match notifications – and it will be easy to stay organized and help more people find carpools. Here’s how it works:
What is “plus addressing”?
Plus addressing, also known as subaddressing is a simple email feature that lets you create variations of the same email address without setting up new accounts. For example, if your team has an inbox called rideshare@regionalcog.org, you can assign a new user the address rideshare+johnsmith@regionalcog.org. Once you set this up, any ridematch message sent to that user will arrive in the same shared mailbox, but the “+johnsmith” part will make it easy for your team to identify the specific user it belongs to. Then you can reach out to the resident by phone or mail to facilitate a match if they are still interested.
Step-by-Step guide to managing an account with plus addressing
Start by choosing or creating a shared inbox to use.
- Example: rideshare@regionalcog.org
Make sure it is one you and anyone on your team responsible for outreach can access. It should be one that your team will check regularly. It’s a good idea to use a shared inbox dedicated to ridematching for this purpose.
Create a new email address by adding “+name” before the @ sign.
- For John Smith, you could write: rideshare+johnsmith@regionalcog.org
- For Maria Lopez, write: rideshare+marialopez@regionalcog.org
You can make these even more unique by adding the last four digits of the user’s phone number after the name. The important thing is to agree on and document a naming convention your team can use reliably to make it easy to organize any incoming match requests for the users.
Register the user using the newly created email address.
If the user wants to log in you can give them the credentials and even help them reset the password. You will not need the password if you have permission to proxy as the user.
Carpool match messages for the user will go to your shared inbox
- No matter what comes after the “+”, emails still arrive at rideshare@regionalcog.org
- The “+name” part is just a tag your team can use to organize and identify messages.
Use filters or folders to stay organized
- Many email systems let you set up rules to sort messages by the “+name” so each resident’s messages are grouped together.