Here’s a little tech tip for those of you working with online systems that require individual email accounts for every participant. Systems require unique email accounts in order to see each registrant as unique and to keep their records uniquely theirs.  So, here’s a tip of how to help families who are working within those systems, but don’t want to sign up for yet another email account.  It’s called the +Email account system. It works for many of the email providers.

To explain a bit deeper.  If you have an email account, say, deb.weitzenkamp@unl.edu, and you need to set up children, spouses, aunt and uncle or whoever on a system that the original account holder (ie deb.weitzenkamp@unl.edu) is already in, then you can use the +feature.  To add another person to a system, but use the same email account, you could use deb.weitzenkamp+spouse@unl.edu; deb.weitzenkamp+child1@unl.edu, or deb.weitzenkamp+child2@unl.edu or all of the above.  As long as you don’t add spaces between your + sign and the alpha numeric characters you add on to it, you have unlimited emails all using the same email account.  All of these +email accounts would come into the same email manager (Outlook) as the original email.

It doesn’t work with all email providers though. I’ve noticed that some of the smaller email providers block the the +email feature.  So, if in doubt, try an email to the +email account you are thinking about setting up before you actually use it.  It won’t bounce back if the original email (in this case deb.weitzenkamp@unl.edu) is valid. It will however appear as a separate email account for most web-based services…allowing you to use one email account for multiple people within the same system.

This is an awesome solution for parents who don’t want to set up an email account for their child, or want to be able to monitor any emails their child is receiving.

Note, since all of these come into the original account, this does not work as a junk email account.  …You will want to set up a separate email account for all of those things you want to sign up for but not give the email account that you actually monitor. You can however, use it with a junk email account, if you want to sign up multiple people using the same junk email account.

Hope this helps you support families in the work that we do!