Did you know you can use unlimited email addresses in your Gmail account? I would be willing to bet a lot of you out there have a Gmail account. In my opinion, Google’s Gmail is the best email client you can have. Like so many other email providers, Gmail is free to sign up for and use. It has many features that can be very helpful. One of those features is the ability to use an unlimited number of email address for yourself. I know this sounds far fetched but it’s true. Let me explain.
By adding punctuation, like a period or plus sign anywhere in the front part of your address you can create an additional email address for your inbox. The front part is anything in front of the @ sign. By adding a period it will change your email address just enough that you can use a filter to move messages to that email address into folders or even directly to the trash. Here are a few examples of what I mean:
john.doe@gmail.com works just the same as johndoe@gmail.com. What’s more, you can add a plus sign and any word before the @ sign (e.g. johndoe+mostlikelyspam@gmail.com) and messages will still be sent to your inbox.
Now you may be asking, “Why in the world do I care that I can have unlimited email addresses”? Well, the answer to that is simple. Here are a few reasons why this can be a good thing.
The next time you sign up for a newsletter or a website makes you enter in your email address, use an address like johndoe+spam@gmail.com. That way, you can filter out everything sent to this address to a low-priority label or folder. There are a couple of different ways that Gmail allows you to mark messages as unimportant, or categorize them.
Depending on how in depth you would want to go, you could even add a specific word for everything you sign up for: johndoe+website1@gmail.com for example. This might eventually become more trouble than its worth, but it does give you the ability to know how many emails a certain provider is sending you or even if they are selling your email address. You can also set up filters to send all of a particular email directly to a specific folder or straight to the trash.
There are many ways you can use this filtering to help keep your inbox more organized. I have only outlined a few, but the sky truly is the limit.
I hope you have found this interesting. If you’ve found another way this can be useful, let us know on one of our social media channels such as Twitter or Facebook.
