Cool Gmail Trick
Here is a very nice Gmail trick I found on precharge.net. Check it out.
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Use Gmail to Generate Unlimited E-mail Addresses:
Gmail has an interesting quirk where you can add a plus sign (+) after your Gmail address, and it’ll still get to your inbox. It’s called plus-addressing, and it essentially gives you an unlimited number of e-mail addresses to play with. Here’s how it works: say your address is pinkyrocks@gmail.com, and you want to automatically label all work e-mails. Add a plus sign and a phrase to make it pinkyrocks+work@gmail.com and set up a filter to label it work (to access your filters go to Settings->Filters and create a filter for messages addressed to pinkyrocks+work@gmail.com. Then add the label work).
More real world examples:
Find out who is spamming you: Be sure to use plus-addressing for every form you fill out online and give each site a different plus address.
Example: You could use
pinkyrocks+nytimes@gmail.com for nytimes.com
pinkyrocks+freestuff@gmail.com for freestuff.com
Then you can tell which site has given your e-mail address to spammers, and automatically send them to the trash.
Automatically label your incoming mail: I’ve talked about that above.
Archive your mail: If you receive periodic updates about your bank account balance or are subscribed to a lot of mailing lists that you don’t check often, then you can send that sort of mail to the archives and bypass your Inbox.
Example: For the mailing list, you could give pinkyrocks+mailinglist1@gmail.com as your address, and assign a filter that will archive mail to that address automatically. Then you can just check in once in a while on the archive if you want to catch up.
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Cool, thanks for the advice. I’m going to give this a try.
Nice tip!
Very Nice indeed!!
This is a great trick, just unfortunately a lot of web forms automatically filter out ‘+’ signs on the basis it isn’t part of a valid email.
It’s true, any web form I’ve ever programmed automatically determines that a ‘+’ in an email is invalid.
Most programmers do the same thing for validation reasons – I’d say the majority of websites do the same, as this is a lesser known trick.
btw, the precharge link is broken
OMG! Awesome trick! Thanks!!! OOH YEAH!!
:D:D
Interesting but very ineffective for protecting your email address. Writing script for extracting “canonical” gmail addresses would take about seven seconds.
As part of Yahoo premium services (about 20 – 25/ year), you have “disposable” email addresses. The service is called Address Guard. It uses the same idea, but better. For example:
If my yahoo email was:
myyahoomail@yahoo.com
I can create a series of disposable email addresses of this format:
widget-website1@yahoo.com
widget-website2@yahoo.com
widget-website3@yahoo.com
So, the “widget-” part is constant, but not related to my real email address. I can make the other ones up (website1, website2, website3) If I start getting spam to widget-website2@yahoo.com, I can just DELETE THAT ADDRESS. Don’t even get the emails anymore. And they still don’t know my real email address.
Yeah, what everyone said is true. Most sites won’t allow this. What I did was sign up for free forwarding at cjb.net and then you can make up bogus email addresses and as long as you have the “yourname.cjb.net” at the end it will get to you. So you could essentially use the same method “newyorktimes@yourname.cjb.net” and have it forwarded to your gmail and filter it out accordingly.
Great tip. i am going into my g-mail account right now and doing this. Thank you!!
no problem! glad you found it useful. stumble it if you want:)