Clever old gMail July 27, 2005
Found this post on Smartertools…
Gmail has a great feature I’ve found extremely useful lately. I never even thought to try it until recently, and now I can’t live without it.
It would be great to get this type of support in my SmarterMail installation, for the dozens of domains I have that leak out email addresses.
The feature is Gmail allows you to add an alias simply by adding a plus “+” after your username. No changes, nada. Gmail will deliver the email normally to the Inbox. But having the “+” allows for easy filtering.
So I signup, say at FordParts.com, and when I need to enter my email address I think of “Ok, let’s make up a new alias for them. Let’s type eric+fordparts@gmailcom here.” I do not need to go into Gmail to make any changes.
For example, I have some of the following aliases at gmail:
eric+forums@gmailcom
eric+ebay@gmailcom
eric+fordparts@gmailcom
eric+nsl@gmailcom
eric+games@gmailcomAnd so on. Now if an email leaks out and I get a spam email, I can view what email address it was sent to and know who leaked it out.
I’ve recently started receiving spam, and they are all sent to eric+games@gmailcom!!! That’s a perfect example of how I was able to trace back who sold my information.
Realised this ain’t so great…
I mean- how difficult will it be for them pesky spammers to use a script to strip the “+” and everything after it and before the “@”… Stoopid old gMail ;)
Also, many web forms will not let you submit an email address with a ‘+’ character in it as it is deemed an illegal character in email addresses. Jeez- what’s wrong with you gmail??