Google Hacks, 2nd Edition

Create and Use Custom Addresses

Make up an unlimited number of arbitrary email addresses to use when signing up for something, making a purchase online, or tracking a conversation.

Those who’ve been exposed to the power of a little something called plus-addressing never look back, using it anywhere and everywhere they can. And, for something so useful, there’s really not much to it.

Simply append a plus sign (+) and some meaningful string of letters or numbers (meaningful to you, that is) to the first part of your email address—the part before the “at” sign (@)—and you have a way of tagging a particular conversation, an address used to sign up for a service or buy something online, or create a throwaway address you have no intention of paying attention to again.

Say your email address is [e-mail]. A plus-addressed version might be [e-mail]. And you don’t have to stop there; you can create subtags and sub-subtags such as [e-mail] and [e-mail] for even more granularity.

And the magic of it is that all plus-addressed email still arrives at the same email address: yours, sans the plus bit. At that point you can filter, sort, highlight, or trash email sent to that particular address as you see fit.

Plus-addressing means never having to say you only have one email address again.

And you’ll be glad to know that Gmail supports plus-addressing, affording you some rather powerful email handling, routing, and filtering ...