Unlimited gmail sub accounts

[Ian]

If you use gmail then did you know you can create unlimited gmail "sub accounts" on it? Why would you want to do this I hear you ask? Well, consider what you typically use your email for: You might use it to write to family and friends, do some online shopping using it, pay household bills using it, sign up to online forums and newsletters, the list goes on.

I typically get 50+ emails per day and unless I keep on top of my inbox things can quickly get out of hand and emails can eaily get missed. With gmail you can create "sub-accounts" using the plus (+) sign and a random "tag".

So, say my gmail address is ian@gmail.com. If I append a plus sign and a random tag after ian and before the @gmail.com then emails will still reach my ian@gmail.com gmail account but will be "tagged" and thus can be filtered or redirected to a specific folder. For example, say I used ian+forums@gmail.com when I signed up to this forum. Whenever I get email notifications from this forum they will land in my inbox but will be addressed to ian+forums@gmail.com. I could then create a folder called "online forums" and create a filter to redirect all these emails to my online forums folder.

You can obviously make this as granular as you like. So, you can create a sub account for each and every forum you're a member of or for every single company you deal with. If you ever start getting spam on one of these sub accounts you'll know where it came from (some unscrupulous companies like to make money by selling your email address). You can then automatically direct all such emails to your spam/deleted items folder.

To create a filter in gmail choose Settings -> Filters -> Create a new filter. In the To field specify your sub-account, eg. ian+forums@gmail.com and click Create filter with this search. In the next box choose what you want to do with these emails. eg. Check Apply the label: and create a new label and click Create filter. Note: Check the Skip the Inbox (Archive it) option if you want the emails to go straight to the relevant folder thus bypassing your inbox.

Have fun

Ian.

[fpp]

Ia, thanks a lot for this tip, I'm sure I'd never heard of this before !

I remember seeing geeks with such tag-overloaded addresses ages ago, in the pre-Internet days, although the syntax was a bit more involved. The goal was the same, it relied on a special feature in good old Sendmail I believe...

[Ian]

You sound as old as me sir!

Presumably then you also remember when compuserve email addresses used to be a sequence of random numbers rather than alphabetic characters. Very memorable!

And when WordPerfect was THE word processor?

Ian.

[fpp]

Yup, been there, done that... no generation X or Y around here :-)

Also, the age of BBSes and 2400baud modems !

[n2o2diver]

Kewl...good info

[fles1000]

Great tip !!