Even though Gmail is great at filtering spam, I still receive a lot of junk mail from unconventional spam sources, such as store subscriptions or doctor’s office appointments. This is usually not spam in the traditional sense, but if you continue to receive emails on a regular basis, it can be very annoying.
Most companies have the option to unsubscribe via email, but many still don’t. Once you learn these three little hacks to your Gmail address, you can spit out a modified version of your email that will still go straight to your inbox, but will allow you to create filters to organize your email any way you like. This allows you to create endless Gmail email address variations.
Breakthrough Point
If you didn’t already know, Gmail does not consider extra periods in your account name when processing email. So, for example, I could write my email address as aseem.1234@gmail.com instead of the usual aseem1234@gmail.com.
You can add as many dots as you want anywhere and the email will still arrive for you. This trick usually works best when registering in forums or anywhere else on the Internet, because most forms accept periods as a valid character for a typical email address.
The Plus Hack
This Gmail hack has been around for a long time and most people already know about it. Just put a “+” after your account name and add a word or words to uniquely identify that email address.
For example, I can change my email address to aseem1234+financial@gmail.com when registering with any bank, credit union, investment site, etc. Now I can create a filter, and all emails related to my financial activities, are automatically moved to the corresponding shortcut.
It is much easier than creating a separate filter for each financial institution. It often happens that the sender email address used by a financial institution changes and therefore you need to update your filter. Since your configured Gmail address will never change, you never have to worry about updating your filter.
The plus reception is very useful, but the downside is that online forms sometimes block it because it is not considered a normal character in email addresses. In this case, use the Dot or Googlemail hack I’m going to mention.
Googlemail hack
Finally, you can change the last part of your email account to googlemail.com instead of your regular gmail.com! This is another great way to not include your primary email address. Obviously, if someone else already knows these tricks, they can easily find out your original email address.
So aseem1234@googlemail.com is the same as gmail.com. If you want your account name to be consistent without any dots or plus signs, you can simply use googlemail.com instead.
You might be wondering why this is when you can just create a filter for the sender’s email address and organize the email that way? This method works great, but just like the financial example I provided above, what if you want to share your email address with some small business clients that you run from home?
If you don’t have a separate work email address, you can send all your customers an email like aseem1234+businessname@gmail.com and then automatically filter those emails by the label created for your business emails. Since you don’t need to know the senders’ emails, creating a filter for a customized recipient address works much better.
These tricks have been around for a long time, and if you’ve been using Gmail for many years, it’s probably nothing new. However, if you’ve recently switched from Yahoo, Outlook, etc., this is an additional feature worth knowing about. Enjoy!
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