Comments on: Cool Gmail Trick

By: Matthew Berman

Matthew Berman — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 21:42:24 +0000

no problem! glad you found it useful. stumble it if you want:)

By: Mattress

Mattress — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 21:31:45 +0000

Great tip. i am going into my g-mail account right now and doing this. Thank you!!

By: fran harrington

fran harrington — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 00:24:29 +0000

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.

By: Digital Quest

Digital Quest — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 18:19:57 +0000

Use Gmail ‘plus-addressing’ to track spammers…

Here is a cool Gmail trick I found on IBD.
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 o…

By: Marty

Marty — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 21:28:39 +0000

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.

By: mitch

mitch — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 10:57:12 +0000

Interesting but very ineffective for protecting your email address. Writing script for extracting “canonical” gmail addresses would take about seven seconds.

By: djDeathx

djDeathx — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 05:17:53 +0000

OMG! Awesome trick! Thanks!!! OOH YEAH!! :D:D:D

By: Mike Bogo

Mike Bogo — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 16:38:46 +0000

btw, the precharge link is broken

By: Mike Bogo

Mike Bogo — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 16:36:03 +0000

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.

By: StrangeJ

StrangeJ — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 17:41:24 +0000

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.