So you use Gmail and you love it. What else can Gmail do for you? It can do a bunch. Now this Gmail tip isn’t just for Gmail. Some other email providers can do this cool trick.
Gmail supports the standard “plus” addressing. Most people don’t know what this means and if they do, they don’t know how it can benefit them. Well here is the low down on this great email tip that has helped me stay more organized in my email inbox:
The “plus” method of addressing lets you add additional words to your account name (the “left side” of your email address.) For example, if your email address is “mary.jane@gmail.com“, you could add “+party” when you give your email address to people you are inviting to a party. So, your email address would be “mary.jake+party@gmail.com“. Now I see that puzzled look on your face, asking WHY? Think of this tip (+ sign) as adding a tag automatically. It makes you stay organized through this easy to use tag.
Using this party as the example, let’s say that you are emailing invites to friends for a party. You ask them to reply to “mary.jane+noway@gtmail.com” when sending you a response if they can’t come or just would never be seen at a party with you, and reply to “john.doe+PaRtY@gmail.com” if they want to party like it is 1999.
Now if they do this, you could set up Gmail Filters which will route emails to specific Labels that you setup based on the email address after the + sign.
OK, this doesn’t seem like a big deal so far. Who really cares about this waste of time. You think? The ways to use this are numerous. Here is a fun way to use this:
Another use is when you are shopping online. When asked for an email address, use something like “mary.jane+shoesrus@gmail.com”. Then you can easily see who is selling your email address to spammers.
Give it a shot. There are many reasons to use this. I use this to see which companies sell to spammers as well as a few Online Promotion Groups that I run. This way I can use one email addy for many groups and still identify them easily.
I really like the idea of using that when giving out an email online to see who is resulting in the most spam. I’ll have to give that a try.
Brilliant idea. Thanks for this.
hmm .. that’s something new i learn today! thx for sharing
Now that IS a very cool tip. Thanks. And you are a SEO master!!
Thanks for the complement Anatomiser!
This is a great feature, but many services do not support the “+” sign when you enter your email address (the software developer is usually lax about creating the correct regular expression to validate this).