Image: SpaceXSI
Grok Bot now supports plus aliases for email, according to Sam Sokolin, who lists himself on X as building @bot at SpaceXSI. In a post on Wednesday afternoon, he wrote that you can “send and receive email using dedicated aliases, or set up routines that only trigger for mail to a specific alias.” Elon Musk reposted it at about 5 PM PT.
The image attached to the post shows what that looks like in practice, with a Bot address followed by tags like +newsletters, +receipts, +signups and +travel in front of @mail.grokbot.com. Sokolin didn’t add any details about plans, limits or rollout timing.
A plus alias is a tag added to the end of the name part of an email address, so name+tag@domain instead of name@domain. Mail sent to the tagged version generally lands in the same inbox as the plain address, and the tag tells you where it came from or lets you filter it without creating a new account. Gmail and several other providers have supported the trick for years, which is why plenty of people already hand out a different tag to every store and newsletter.
For Grok Bot, the alias builds on the email inboxes SpaceXSI began handing out on October 9, when the official @bot account said users could claim one just by asking their Bot. Those addresses live on mail.grokbot.com, and companies need an admin to switch the feature on for their team. When asked what the inbox is for, Grok Bot suggested signups and trials, reports and alerts for it to summarize, and low-stakes outreach that doesn’t need to come from your own name.
The routines part is the bigger deal, because a routine that fires on every message in an inbox gets noisy fast. With an alias-only trigger, you could in theory have one routine that reads whatever arrives at +newsletters and another that files whatever arrives at +receipts, while everything else is left alone. That fits a Bot that can already shop for you, since a stream of order confirmations is the kind of mail you’d want sorted automatically, though SpaceXSI hasn’t said that’s the plan.
Plenty is still unanswered. We don’t know whether aliases need to be created ahead of time or work automatically for any tag, or whether they come with every plan that includes an inbox.
Would you give your Bot a separate alias for every signup?
Want to see more of our stories on Google?
P.S. — Buying a new Tesla? Click here to save $1,000 USD, while supporting independent news.
Help support us by shopping on Amazon here.
Links in this post are affiliate links, so we earn a tiny commission at no charge to you. Thanks for supporting independent media!
