I came across this neat little trick that allows you to utilize an infinite number of Gmail addresses. Why would you want to do this you may ask? Well, you pretty much have to use your email address to sign up to anything online, and sometimes you might start getting ads and spam for no reason, tracking down who sent it or how your email address got out can be a pain, so you end up just having to bear it.

There is also the matter of labels and filters in Gmail. Sometimes you want to know where the emails are specifically coming from but you can’t be guaranteed that the senders email will never change, as with a few forums I’ve found, their newsletter email can change from time to time making your filters, which look for the senders address, redundant.

To solve these issues, Google, in their infinite wisdom, has enabled some features to allow you to change your email address but have them still get sent to your main Inbox, here’s how:

When you are signing up to a forum instead of just putting in:

“joeblogs@gmail.com”

put in:

“joeblogs+website@gmail.com”

(i.e. for Amazon it would be something like “joe+amazon@gmail.com”)

These emails will all be delivered to your main Inbox (i.e. joe@gmail.com) but will have been tagged as being sent to the address with the plus sign in it. You can then set up a filter or label for this address so you know where it is coming from (i.e. A label named “Amazon” could look for “+amazon” in the address of the receiver), as your address will never change the label will never expire and also if you do start receiving spam or ads, you can quickly tell where they are coming from by who they are being sent to. You can then contact that forum or site and let them know that they or others are recording email addresses and sending spam to them, further to this you can also now easily block the spam by blocking the address it is being sent to.

I’ve been using this for a while now, since moving to Gmail, and it’s excellent. The only problem you might run into is that the signup form for the respective site might now allow you to use the “+” symbol. If this is the case, you may need to just use your main address. Alternatively, you can also just put a period in your name and see if that is allowed.

i.e. all of the below addresses will send the email to your main Inbox:

j.oeblogs@gmail.com
jo.eblogs@gmail.com
joe.blogs@gmail.com
joeb.logs@gmail.com … etc

Try it, I guarantee within a week you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it. It’s one of those things that makes you ask “why hasn’t email been this way from the start?”

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