Some Great Gmail Advice

Posted on Friday, September 8, 2006 by Frank Roche

If you don’t have a Gmail address, you should. ‘Nuf said. If you do, there’s a cool hack revealed by Modern Day Alchemist that allows you to use Gmail to its fullest:

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 and 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.