Unlimited GMail Addresses
Sep 10

Unlimited GMail Addresses

Use Gmail Generate Unlimited E-mail Addresses: Here’s a feature in Gmail I didn’t know about.

Gmail has an interesting quirk where you can add a plus sign ( ) after your Gmail address, and it’ll still get to your inbox. It’s called plus-addressing, and it essentially gives you an unlimited number of e-mail addresses to play with.

You can use it to filter email, essentially assigning it a label when it’s sent rather than when you receive it.

[…] say your address is pinkyrocks@gmail.com, and you want to automatically label all work e-mails. Add a plus sign and a phrase to make it pinkyrocks+work@gmail.com and set up a filter to label it work.

[sigh] I love Gmail.

by Deane   September 10, 2006 1:56 AM   |
  tags: 
Gmail

Comments

by Brad Rhine,   September 10, 2006 7:20 AM  

Gmail does indeed rock, but I seem to remember that this is also an old sendmail trick.

by Bill Bumgarner,   September 10, 2006 10:57 AM  

No trick involved.? This has been a part of the standard for @ style addressing forever.

In other words, if you ever have an email provider that doesn't support + style addressing, they are not following the standards and you should complain.

It won't get you anywhere, but it might make you feel better.

by Deane,   September 10, 2006 5:58 PM  

Really? I'm so not old-school...

by B,   January 7, 2007 1:16 PM  

This is not a standard. According to RFC 2822, a plus sign is just another allowed character. Some mail servers (sendmail in particular) treat plus just as you say. However, as it's not a standard no sender should think they know what the plus sign means. Too many reject it because they think it's not valid -- as noted in the wikipedia article Hotmail in particular rejects 14 valid characters! So that makes this trick less useful. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_address

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