More Email..addresses

Well, this is actually a way to manage your email better -- if you're using Gmail, that is.

Google is a powerful beast. So powerful, that there are all sorts of features that they simply never publicize because you'd complain of information overload. This feature was describes quite a while ago by a number of Google watching sites, but I think it's worth mentioning again.

I've mentioned using anyone@mailinator.com email addresses before as a way to prevent spammers from getting your real email address and to allow you access to a doc link or some other one-time bit of information that you need to receive via email. You can make up those addresses on the fly and then use them and forget about them. But what if you just want to be able to manage the mail you want to receive a little better? True, Gmail has some pretty powerful filtering options, but did you know about these gems...?

If your email address is BobbyRoberts@gmail.com....... It's also Bobby.Roberts@gmail.com. And B.o.b.b.y.R.o.b.e.r.t.s@gmail.com and BobbyRoberts+TraceMe@gmail.com and may more combinations you probably never thought of. All of these will send mail to the same email account (but don't use these for testing. Bobby might get mad.)

Basically Gmail strips the period out of any email addresses when it determines where to deliver the mail. I had a friend at work complain that he kept getting mail for someone other than himself in his Gmail account. It was mail intended for another person with the same name. This was a very brief glitch in the way that Gmail was handing out email addresses initially that brought to light their parsing of periods. The intended recipient was xxx.yyy@gmail.com, but my friend's address was xxxyyy@gmail.com. That pesky period was stripped out for delivery and xxxyyy@gmail.com received xxx.yyy@gmail.com's mail.

So what do you do with this knowledge? Gmail doesn't differentiate email addresses that differ by only a period, but most other sites that require your email address do. So you can use this as a way to separate out mail from one source from another. Give xxx.yyy to your friends, and xxxyyy to the websites. Then set up filters in Gmail to categorize them or apply labels, or any other action.

The "plus-addressing works similarly. You can append a plus sign and another combination of valid characters after your real GMail address before the @ sign and the mail will still be delivered to you. Use xxxyyy+shopping@gmail.com for on-line purchases or xxxyyy+Amazon@gmail.com and xxxyyy@BestBuy@gmail.com to keep track of mail received about your accounts. Another neat trick using the plus-addressing is that if you give out unique "plus-addresses" to sites you think might sell your information, you can watch the email address spread. Say you use xxxyyy+website1@gmail.com and you start receiving mail from website2 at your website1 address... Bingo! Your email address has been sold (or traded, bartered, freely passed on, whatever). But since you never gave your real email address, you can simply change the filter you setup and delete that mail right away and never deal with it (or the company who sold your email address) again!