gmail "+" filter

A while ago i read a magazine that was talking about some gmail + filter. For example, if you want to sign up for a site that requires an email address to sign up you would give them your email like this: (if your email is [email protected]) [email protected]. That way, if this site decides to sell your email address to spammers you can just block all emails from [email protected] and never have to worry about those emails finding their way into your inbox again.

Anyone heard of this? I cant remember how to use it now that i finally got a google account.

 

Yeah, just post [email protected] during registration, and when they send a mail to you, it'll be from from: [email protected], to: [email protected]. So if they sell your email address to any spam ****s, it'll be sent to [email protected]m, so you'd know who did it.

That's only one use of this filter though.

For example, you have a party at your place, and you mail an invite to 100 people and ask them whether or not they'd come. You can create two new labels - Yes, and No, and set them such that any mail arriving to [email protected] goes to label Yes, and any mail arriving to [email protected] goes to label No. Ask the people to send a blank mail to any of these two based on whether or not they'll come, and tada, you just have them sorted automatically!

I hope I was clear.

 

Any smart spammer could write a program in a few minutes that handles cases of [email protected] to strip the +site out and send spam to both [email protected] and [email protected].

It does however, tell you which sites sold you out.

I believe .Mac (and some other services) offer truly unique aliases.
For example:

[email protected] could have [email protected] and [email protected] assigned to it. If a spam bot got ahold of an alias, just delete the alias and the address becomes useless to the spammer. Used wisely, alias can effectively mask your true email address to spammers.

 

The Dot

Apparently, Gmail does not recognize the dot (or capitalization either) in gmail addresses. So [email protected] is the same as [email protected] and all the different combinations are sent to your inbox.

The Plus

You have an unlimited amount of aliases with Gmail. You can receive messages that are sent to [email protected]. For example, if you forced to register online, you can use [email protected].

Gmail.com=Googlemail.com

Your [email protected] is also the same as [email protected]. Mail from either address goes to your inbox. This is probably because they can’t use gmail.com in Europe. Just a reminder though, you’ll need to login with the original address you signed up with and some websites won’t accept symbols as valid email addresses.

 

oh, thats probably why i couldnt find any options in gmail that would have helped (i thought you had to create the +site thing in gmail first before you were able to use it).

Now if only i can remember to use this

thanks for the help.

 

The best method is to sign up another gmail account (e.g. [email protected]) for signing up different sites and forward this account to your original gmail account ([email protected]). This way, when you sign up different sites, you can give them [email protected], even if they remove +site on purpose, they still won't know your real gmail account ([email protected]).