There's a little known feature supported by most email providers (Gmail included) - in the first part of the email address (before the @ sign), everything after a plus sign is ignored. So, for example, email sent to myname+news@gmail.com will be treated the same way (and received in the same inbox) as myname@gmail.com.
How is this useful?
When some site requests your email address, you can tag all the mail coming from this site by adding any string after the plus sign - this is called "Plus Addressing". You can then create filters to perform actions based on the tag of the incoming mail, such as moving it to a certain folder.
For example, here's an incoming mail marked with the +blog tag:
Now I can create a filter which will direct such mail to a certain folder (label):
Another possible use is to give each site a different address (such as myname+sitename@gmail.com). This way, if some site gives it away to spammers (or perhaps it was hacked and the email was stolen) - you know where it comes from, and can block all mail coming to this specific address.
No comments:
Post a Comment