Two Less known tricks for Gmail users

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Saad Hamid on March 6, 2008

You see! when they say that Gmail is the best, they say it for a reason. Yesterday, the official Gmail blog shared two interesting hidden features about Gmail that most people still don't know about. The basic story is that when you register an email address with Gmail, say myemail@gmail.com, you get a whole set of multiple email addresses which are a subset of the your base email address.

Gmail Hidden Trick # 1

You can append a plus ("+") sign and any combination of words or numbers after your email address. Like if you have an email, say myemail@gmail.com, you can use myemail+friends@gmail.com or myemail+office@gmail.com to let users send a mail to your myemail@gmail.com account and then you could set up a filter to automatically star, archive or label emails different incoming emails. Here is a tutorial by Google on how to setup a filter.

Gmail Hidden Trick # 2

You can use one or several dots (".") anywhere in your email address. Basically you are allowed to do this because Gmail doesn't count periods or dots as characters so it would treat your email the same way no matter where you put the dot. For example your email, say myemail@gmail.com, can be used with the following variations

my.email@gmail.com
mye.mail@gmail.com
my.e.mail@gmail.com

and luckily Gmail will recognize and send all the email sent to these addresses to your base account.

http://alifaan.cyberlounge.biz alifaan

lol, nice trick
http://www.spam.la Steven

This is quite normal…lol no trick…most people that use Gmail should know this and most do know it.
http://www.lytebyte.com Joel

I knew about the (+) thing but never knew about dot (.)…nice tip
http://www.sizlopedia.com Dj Flush

@Steven

You should probably tell that to the people at the official Gmail blog who wrote the blog post sharing the trick.
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http://www.small-software-utilities.com/google/113/gmail-hidden-features/ Software

Very nice features! IMHO the possibility to track who gave your email to spammers is wonderful!
http://www.sizlopedia.com Dj Flush

@Software

Exactly! Just set a filter to see where your spam is coming from and you can easily track down the source.
Asdf

Also, you can have your emails sent to yourname@googlemail.com.
http://www.paranoiaparadise.com paranoiaparadise

Thanks for sharing those tricks. I will definately use that in the future. especially the “+” trick is very useful.
http://www.bradfrostweb.com/blog Brad Frost

I’ve been using these tricks for a while now. They are extremely practical for organizing your email applications. For example,

youremail@gmail.com – use for friends and family

your.email@gmail.com – use for site logins

y.ouremail@gmail.com – use for anything you see as a potential risk

and i get more specific for certain things, such as youremail+myspace@gmail.com
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