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.
6 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.