Gmail + Aliases
Some email providers support something called “plus” addressing. Gmail is one of them. It’s not a well-known feature; in fact, I don’t believe it is even documented in the Gmail help pages.
Essentially, “plus” addressing lets you create aliases by appending additional characters to the account name part of your email address. To do this, precede it by a plus sign (+). For example, if your gmail address is johnsmith@gmail.com you can create the following alias:
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johnsmith+test@gmail.com
No matter what valid characters you place after the plus sign (up to eight characters max), the mail will be delivered to you Gmail inbox.
So, why would you want to do this? There are a couple reasons I can think of. One is to (try) to control future spam. When you sign up for something at a web site, instead of giving your regular Gmail address, make one up for the site. For example, if you were to sign up for a free newsletter at extrahotsizzlingstocktips.com you might use the email address of johnsmith+extrahot@gmail.com. Since you can see the “To:” address in your gmail messages, you can see if any future spam from other sites are using this address. If so, you know where it came from. At that point, you can treat emails to that address as spam. (Of course, I’m sure some sites will have this naming scheme figured out and sell your real gmail email, but many probably won’t)
You can also search and sort your email based upon the “plus” address. If each service you are signed up to is given a different email alias, you can search on that alias, or set up labels to automatically file these emails into unique labels.
If you aren’t using this to control spam, you can set up broad email aliases and associated label categories like “stocks”, “banks”, “technicl” (8 characters max) and so on. Then, you would use johnsmith+stocks@gmail.com for all your stock investment services, johnsmith+banks@gmail.com for all your bank accounts and johnsmith+technicl@gmail.com for all your technical site sign ups. Everything will be neatly organized under the associated labels.
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Wow, I sometimes wonder at your ability to find these obscure features, Mark.
This is a big help!
Not really an issue, but it would seem you can’t send mail to yourself using this method!
And it would be complete if you could also reply with an “plus”-address.
Now you get an email on thijs+boo@gmail.com and the standard reply-to address is thijs@gmail.com
Hmmm, that’s not entirely true. The message DOES get delivered to you, it just does not end up in your Inbox–it is viewable using the All Mail view. When someone else sends you “plus” addressed email, ot does show up in your Inbox.
A practical use for sending YOURSELF a “plus” email is to use a Filter to apply a specific Label to the message. For example, I have a Label called “Notes” and a Filter set up such that whenever a message is addressed to my.address+notes@gmail.com (sent by me or anyone) it gets auto-Labeled “Notes” and bypasses the Inbox. That way, I can save notes and tidbits of information whenever I want. I also set up a Contact called “Notes” with my “+notes” address, so when I compose a message, I just type “Notes” into the address line and Gmail auto-fills in the rest.
I posted this in one of my Gmail Tips at my GmailTips.com site…
-Jim
GmailTips.com
JimsTips.com
If a website has figured out the plusses and doesn’t allow them, you can also put periods in your address. My address is swimmer618@gmail.com, but a filter puts anything that goes to swimmer.618@gmail.com in the trash.
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Gmail’s plus-addressing doesn’t seem to work any more, can someone confirm that? I always get an “Delivery Status Notification (Failure)” reply.
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I guess, plus method might not stop spam at all…. because, when more people will use it, the spammers would obviously find out and extact out the genuine email id.
this is something like finding emails of people from yahoo groups pages….. as simple as that.
the gmail form of alias is stupid, others allow you to create a complete alias@yourdomain.com, it would be nice if gmail offered this, as it is there’s no way in hell i’d use gmail alias
lollll
if you want an alias with gmail you have to create an other accunt looooooooooooolllllllllllllll
maybe it is a method for them to say:
“we have the most gmail accunt than every other webmails” xD
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Regards Marty-Original Message- From: Wendy Smoak