Gmail + Plus + Dot = Countless Aliases of Your Gmail Address

There are at least two ways you can modify your Gmail address and still get your mail. You can set up filters to automatically direct received messages to Trash, apply a label or star, skip the Inbox, or forward to another email account.


1) Plus-addressing

Gmail supports plus-addressing of emails. Messages can be sent to addresses in the form: gmail.user+extratext@gmail.com where extratext can be any string. Plus-addressing allows users to sign up for different services with different aliases and then easily filter all e-mails from those services. It does not appear, however, that the +string feature works when sending email from a gmail account to itself. Additionally (in some cases) the string appended to the e-mail address may not be longer than six characters.

For example, if your name was joesmith@gmail.com, you could send mail to joesmith+friends@gmail.com or joesmith+facebook@gmail.com.

The plus ("+") sign is not simply a Gmail feature, but one of the valid characters in email addresses as specified by RFC-5233 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5233). Although it's true that many email validation tools don't take this into account.

Here is the step-by-step instruction on how to filter incoming emails using Gmail plus-addressing: http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Plus-Addressing-in-Gmail

2) Dot within username

Gmail doesn't recognize dots (".") as characters within usernames, you can add or remove the dots from a Gmail address without changing the actual destination address; they'll all go to your inbox, and only yours. In short:

joesmith@gmail.com = joe.smith@gmail.com
joesmith@gmail.com = j.o.e.smith@gmail.com
joesmith@gmail.com = Joe.Smith@gmail.com

All these addresses belong to the same person. You can see this if you try to sign in with your username, but adding or removing a dot from it. You'll still go to your account.



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