Access Multiple Email Accounts
Unlimited gmail accounts?
If you are using gmail then you already have the ability to use unlimited email addresses.
Gmail does not recognize dots, ”.” or periods as characters in Google email address user names.
This means that Gmail ‘sees’ my.name@gmail.com or myna.me@gmail.com as the same address as myname@gmail.com
You can also use multiple ‘dots’ in the username such as my.na.me@gmail.com
The same ‘dot blindness’ also applies to email addresses using the @googlemail.com domain name with my.name@googlemail.com or my.na.me@googlemail.com being routed to the same Inbox as myname@gmail.com
The third trick for extending the use of your Gmail account is the ability to add extra characters to the end of your username by inserting a plus sign, ‘+’ after your name.
Google does not recognize these characters but Gmail search filters do. The characters after the plus sign can be either letters or numbers.
So myname+abcde@gmail.com or myname+abcde@googlemail.com will end up in the same Inbox as myname@gmail.com
What would you use all these variations for?
One use is to track where mail is coming from. When you sign up for a newsletter subscription or mailing list, create a specific email address by using the plus sign and some specific characters or ‘dot’ pattern. You can then track incoming email based on the specific email name that you created.
For example, you sign up for a subscription to a newsletter using my.name+456news@gmail.com and then in addition to the newsletter you signed up for you start receiving email from a number of other different sources to that specific address. This could indicate that the specific mailing list might have been compromised or even sold.
Another use of these address variations is for sorting out spam or unwanted email from a specific email address. By using Gmail filters you can automatically direct mail to a specific address, such as myname+666@gmail.com to the spam folder.
Variations on your address can also be used to separate out personal and business messages and automatically identify each with a different label and sorted to a different folder.
