Gmail+ your email – filter maillists and catch spam
A great “hidden” feature in Gmail, is the option to append a + followed by any text you like to the username part of your email address.
This text will be ignored by Gmail, and you will receive your emails as usual, but it allows you to create unique email addresses on the fly.
For example if your email is [email protected], you can use a separate address for each of the services you subscribe to:
Emails sent to either of these aliases will arrive in your normal email, but now you can easily filter them. For example if they were sent to ole+facebook@gmail, they can automatically be put in your “Facebook” folder.
This can help you organize your incoming mail and weed out sources of spam. If your find that [email protected], which you used to subscribe to some dubious maillist, has been sold to spammers, you can just direct all mail sent to that address directly into the Spam folder. Easy peasy!
The dotted line
Another feature is the ability to insert and remove dots in the username part of your email. Say your email address is [email protected], then you can also use variations like these:
Aliases like these will still point to your normal email address.
Google Apps accounts
You can also use the + feature with your Google Apps email account, however inserting or removing dots will not work, and your email will be rejected.