Sunday, January 20, 2013

Generating Additional E-Mail Addresses from GMail


There are two really great ways to use your Gmail address that can give you greater control over your inbox and save you time and headaches. When you choose a Gmail address, you actually get more than just "yourusername@gmail.com." Here are two different ways you can modify your GMail address and still get your mail:


  1. Insert one or several dots (".") anywhere in your email address. Gmail doesn't recognize periods as characters in addresses -- instead, they are just ignored. For example, you could tell people your address was assmoothassilk@gmail.com, but that address has some visual problems. However, tell them instead your address is as.smooth.as.silk@gmail.com
  2. Append a plus ("+") sign and any combination of words or numbers after your email address. For example, if your name was cookingguy@gmail.com, you could send mail to cookingguy+friends@gmail.com or cookingguy+mailinglists@gmail.com
The great part...for both of these tricks, you need to configure or set up ABSOLUTELY nothing other than have a GMail address. You have infinite e-mail addresses available to you, with just one account.


One of the significant values in being able to manipulate your email address is that it makes it really easy to filter on those variants. For example you could use cookingguy+bank@gmail.com when you sign up for online banking and then set up a filter to automatically star, archive or label emails addressed to cookingguy+bank@gmail.com.

You can also use this when you register for a service and think they might share your information. For example, you might add "+donation" when giving money to a political organization, and later when you see emails from other groups to that address, you know exactly how they got it. Then build a filter, perhaps to auto-delete.

2 comments:

  1. Great tips! Thanks for letting us know about these. So often we have to give our email addresses and this is a wonderful way to be able to give our email address without having to swim through spam later!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks, Carolyn. It is a very cool and somewhat underused feature inside of GMail. You will still get the e-mails (and the spam), but it can be easier to figure out where that spam came from, and to build filters to move it out of view.

    ReplyDelete