Use This One Weird Trick For Your HIFIS Email System

Did I get you? Sorry about the clickbait title, I couldn’t resist. Because it is a weird trick!
Most people don’t know that you can add a plus sign and a tag to your email address and have it go to the same place. For example:
ali@acreconsulting.ca
ali+personal@acreconsulting.ca
ali+newsletter@acreconsulting.ca
ali+ads@acreconsulting.ca
All of the above all go to the same place!
This approach is called sub-addressing or plus-addressing, and is supported by most (but not all) email services, including Google, Outlook, and iCloud. (You should definitely test it to see if it works with your email service before taking my word for it.)
You can use this to your advantage in a lot of different ways, if you’re creative. For example, if I’m concerned that some Big Tech Company is selling my data, I could sign up for Facebook using ali+Facebook@acreconsulting.ca and sign up for Amazon using ali+Amazon@acreconsulting.ca. Then if I start getting a bunch of unsolicited emails addressed to ali+Facebook@acreconsulting.ca, I know how they got my email.
Or, if I’m required to provide my email address to access some random eBook or other freebie but I don’t want to hear from the creator again, I could sign up using ali+spam@acreconsulting.ca or ali+noreply@acreconsulting.ca, and then set up a filter to automatically delete incoming mail addressed to that address.
So what does this have to do with HIFIS? I’m so glad you asked.
HIFIS has an email system by which you can attach an email address to each user account, and if the user needs to reset their password, an email will get sent to their email address. However, HIFIS requires a unique email address for each user account.
Meanwhile, there are lots of organizations out there that have email addresses set up for each position, that are not unique to the individual. This morning, for example, I emailed someone whose address was outreach@companyname.org and I often see addresses like supervisor@companyname.org or casemanager2@companyname.org.
Let’s imagine that a case worker, “Ann” has the email address caseworker@companyname.org. She has a user account in HIFIS that she uses to login, which means that actions are attributable to her as an individual. Then Ann leaves her position and is replaced by “Beth.” Beth inherits the same email address from Ann, which is good for continuity of service, but does create a HIFIS problem. We could give Beth Ann’s old HIFIS login information, but that’s not recommended because we always discourage sharing HIFIS user accounts.
So it’s a better approach to create a brand new HIFIS account for Beth, but uh-oh, when we set up her account, we get an error message saying that “A user name for that e-mail address already exists. Please enter a different e-mail address.”
You see, HIFIS requires that each user account have a unique email address. One thing we could do is go back and edit Ann’s account and delete her email address before setting up Beth’s account, but that’s a little clunky.
That’s where This One Weird Trick comes to the rescue! Set up Ann’s HIFIS user account with the email address caseworker+Ann@companyname.org and set up Beth’s HIFIS user account with the address caseworker+Beth@companyname.org. That way you get the best of all worlds!
Note that this also works for things like accessing training. On ACRE Consulting Academy, for example, users sign up with an email address and their training progress is attached to that email address. In other words, if Ann and Beth used the same email, Beth would be unable to complete her training because Ann had already completed it and been issued a certificate with her name on it.
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