Another Way to Reduce Spam Messages

Here is a trick for anyone who uses Google's Gmail service:

Here's a method of creating unlimited virtual addresses to make it easier to sort mail and identify spam. For example, you can create a separate email address for each account you establish with an online merchant, such as amazon or ebay or ancestry.com. It even works for this newsletter. As long as you set up a "catchall" address with your email provider, all of these will be forwarded to your main account, and you can use your email client to sort and filter these as you see fit.

You can do this with Gmail, without having to pay to set up your own domain or deal with mail servers. Just add a plus sign and any text you want after your address but prior to the “at sign.” Gmail will ignore anything from the plus sign forward and send the message to your normal Gmail account. You can then use Gmail's filters to sort your mail based on these suffixes.

Let's create a few examples. First, let's assume that your e-mail address is myname@gmail.com.

Substitute your real Gmail address in place of myname@gmail.com.

You might be suspicious that some merchants are sharing your e-mail address with others, such as giving your address to spammers. You can create "special addresses" for each merchant: you might create myname+ancestry@gmail.com and use that address only when signing up for Ancestry.com services. In a similar manner, you might create myname+facebook@gmail.com when signing up for Facebook. You could sign up with Twitter by using an e-mail address of myname+twitter@gmail.com.

That's all there is to it: in front of the "at sign" simply insert a plus sign followed by anything you want (no spaces or "funny punctuation.")

You will receive the e-mail in your normal Gmail account, as always. However, when you receive a "spammy" message, you will know how they got your e-mail address. You can see that the message was sent to myname+facebook@gmail.com which reveals that the sender obtained your e-mail address from Facebook.

You can also invoke Gmail's filters to create a new rule to automatically move all future incoming messages sent to that full address to the Trash.

Simple… and it works.

Comments

[Infinite Ancestors]

In Gmail you can also insert any number of periods (".") anywhere before the "@" sign to make even more unique combinations (and even use it in combination with the plus sign). They will all be delivered to your main Gmail account. This is especially useful for those web sites that will not accept the plus-sign addresses (even though they are valid). You do have to be a little careful with plus-sign addressing though... some web sites will accept it in the entry form, but their downstream processing may remove it and you won't get any emails. The nice thing about both schemes is that you can make them up on the fly. The downside is that to a human at least (and potentially to a smart program), your base Gmail address is exposed.

[TL Sturgill]

Just a quick note:

Some online forms will not accept the "+ sign" format, they will reject it the same as if you'd left out the "@" sign from an email addy.

Any entity who knows the formula for gmails [very useful] "+name" option can simply strip it out. Tho happily, I'd guess that phishing and multiple email purchasers will not be likely to take the time to do so.