I’m a huge fan of Google’s online applications: GMail, Google Reader, etc. One little known feature of GMail which I find myself using over and over again is the ability to add extra metadata to my gmail email address to let me know where the email came from.
Let’s say that I have a gmail address: sean@gmail.com
Now if I am signing up for a newsletter at XYZ Corp. I can register with the email address sean+xyz@gmail.com You can put in any extra alphanumeric information after the plus sign and it still gets delivered to sean@gmail.com. Furthermore you can apply a filter in Gmail to process the email a certain way based on the email address that you signed you for (sean+xyz@gmail.com).
One handy use of this feature is to track where emails are coming from so if you started to get spammed for instance you will know which address was passed onto a third party.
15 Responses to “Multiple email addresses for one Gmail Account”
- 1 Pingback on Oct 18th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
- 2 Pingback on Mar 28th, 2008 at 6:48 pm
- 3 Pingback on Oct 23rd, 2008 at 8:37 am
Good hint. I wasn’t aware of that. I have my own domain which is handy as I subscribe to lists using des_listname etc etc but use my gmail account for a lot of potential spam.
I notice that using a in my gmail address isn’t acceptable to your comments system !!!
Thanks for the comment Des. I too have used the catch all on my own domains. I think there is a subtle difference here with the catchall and the gmail method I outlined above. Generally the catchall on a domain will accept any local part of an email address i.e. abc123xyz@mydomain.com which means it is much more open to spamming because all someone has to know is your domain name (which they can find by crawling the web) whereas with the gmail system they would have to know your original gmail address first (which I keep a closely guarded secret
)
Interesting about Wordpress (my blog system) not allowing the plus sign, according to RFC 2822 (outlines the rules for email address formats), the local-part of the address may use any of these ASCII characters:
* Uppercase and lowercase letters (case sensitive)
* The digits 0 through 9
* The characters ! # $ % & ‘ * - / = ? ^ _ ` { | } ~
* The character . provided that it is not the first or last character in the local-part.
Thanks man that was great.
How can I get a 2nd email address for my account. I have tried to add one but I keep getting my account deleted
Using the MX facility of CPanel domains, It is possible to use, say, me@me.com so that it sends and recieves via this address but in reality uses google mail in the background. However, does anyone know if you can do this using more than 1 email address (rather than have GM collect the emails, as explained above) ??
Hi Chris,
Thanks for the comment. I have setup Google Apps for domains on a number of sites which involves changing the MX DNS record as you stated. It is definitely not limited to 1 email address. I have set it up on domains with 5-10 email addresses, I am not sure if there is a hard limit on the number of accounts. The way it works is that by changing the MX record you send all email received at that domain via Google’s email servers not just for 1 account as you stated. The online help is quite good, see it here at http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/static.py?page=setup_guide.html&hl=en
If you need any more help then let me know.
Thank you Sean, a very prompt and helpful reply.
In order to setup multiple email addresses on 1 one google mail account, please see the posting and link above.
Just for further clarification. Google Apps allows you to use Gmail for accessing your email for me@mydomain.com and for multiple email accounts on that domain. This isn’t to be confused with actual gmail.com email addresses. If you want to be able to manage multiple gmail.com email addresses fromt the one gmail.com account then use the method in the actual post above. If however you want to take advantage of the gmail interface and Google’s back end technologies (anti-spam etc.) and keep your email at mydomain.com then you want to look at Google Apps for domains as discussed in the preceding comments.
i am new to gmail..and i find it so hard to get answers to questions i have there..even tho i have checked over and over again the help section.all i want to know for now are 3 things
1) how do i delete my gmail account if i need to?
2) how do i block certain email addresses from sending me messages?
3) am i able to get a secondary gmail address in addition to the one i ahve? and if so..how do i do that?
thanks to any1 for any help or suggestions..:)
answers for #9
1) see http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=8152
2) either set a filter for them or mark them as spam
3) sign up for another Gmail account, or use the process mentioned above.
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