Did you know you can have an almost unlimited supply of Gmail addresses to use in a variety of ways? One of the little tricks I mentioned recently when speaking at BlogIndiana 2010 was the ability to make a simple modification to your Gmail email address and then use that change to add another level of filtering to your email rules and labels.
When Google parses the email addresses for it’s Gmail system, it ignores everything following a ” + ” symbol and before the “@” symbol.
What this means is that you can add suffixes to your email address that appear valid to another service, but is completely ignored by Gmail. This gives you the ability to have disposable email addresses to use as needed.
Scenario: Sign-up for Email Newsletter
How many times have you wanted to sign-up for some kind of email newsletter, but were worried about the junk mail you might start getting by sharing your email address?
With this Google trick, you could accomplish the following:
Sign-up for the email newsletter and specify your email address as [email protected]
Now anything sent to this email address will come into your Gmail Inbox as normal, but you can now also setup an email filter in Gmail to look for this address as the recipient and automatically move it to another folder and archive it so it doesn’t clog up your Inbox.
If perhaps you start getting spammed at that email address, you can just change your filter to automatically trash the message so you never have to worry about it again.
I use a variation of this kind of trick with my own domain and the use of alias/forwarder addresses. I’ll cover that in an upcoming post.
Gerald Young says
The problem I have is that many sites don't consider + as a valid part of an email address. I use the own domain + alias/forwarders quite a lot. It was easier when I had a catch-all, but that begat infinite loop spam, so I had to make the hundred+ forwarders.
Jaimin Rajani says
Here's a nice way of filtering out newsletters – https://www.tech.nolicio.us/2011/09/gmail-filter-t…