This Is Cool
A cow-orker just showed me this trick. When giving out your email address to a website, you might want to know how they’re using it. If you have a GMail account, let’s say suziesmith@gmail.com, you can tack on a little tag, like this: suziesmith+amazon@gmail.com. It doesn’t matter what string you put after the “+”, (within reason, I’m sure) email sent to your normal address will still be delivered to you, and you can filter on it. Tres cool.
June 19th, 2007 at 2:18 pm
Nice. I wonder if thats just for Gmail or for any email… I’ll have to try it sometime. I’m guessing the “amazon” or whatever you put after the plus is what you are filtering?
June 19th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
I believe it’s just for GMail. Just tried it on my work email and it bounced.
June 19th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
It is part of a [relatively] new standard that was implemented in Gmail. I’m not sure if any other programs have implemented it or not. Unfortunately, because of its newness, you will occasionally find sites which reject the use of ‘+’ in your email address. Then you have to wonder how long it will take for people using your email in ways you wish they didn’t to recognize that they can strip the “+” and anything following up to the “@” to get your actual address. But I still find it useful when registering for mostly legitimate sites while continuing to use junk email addresses for the more questionable sites.
This looks like the definition, RFC 3598.
June 19th, 2007 at 3:42 pm
I think technically that’s a violation of some RFC or other. The plus sign is a valid eMail character…
Weird but kinda useful…
June 19th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
It’s a valid character, but who the e-mail actually goes to is gmail’s concern, not the RFC’s. As long as whoever+whatever@gmail.com gets to the right person (where “the right person” is up to gmail to decide), it’s all good.
This is a trés neat trick. Now no one will ever get a normal e-mail from me again!
June 19th, 2007 at 6:12 pm
Another neat trick: for a truly throw-away email, give them anyaddressyouwanttomakeup@mailinator.com
Then you can go to mailinator.com and “log in” to that address, without even needing to create an account. It’s not secure — anyone who can guess theaddressyoumadeup@mailinator.com can get your email, and the emails are deleted after a few days. But it’s a pretty sweet way to get email from a site that you think is likely to sell your info to spammers.
June 19th, 2007 at 6:17 pm
Also, a warning about using the + sign: although the + is legitimately allowed in an email address, a lot of sites still won’t let you use it. And it may be that certain parts of certain sites allow it while other parts of the same site do not.
For example, I once bought a monitor from Dell and signed up for an account with myemail+dell@test.com, which worked fine. A couple months later, I wanted to access online tech support and had to log in with the email address I’d provided earlier. The tech support site rejected my login, with an error message like “invalid email format”. I had to call them to set it straight.
June 20th, 2007 at 8:31 am
To jump on the cool-email-tricks bandwagon, you can also use GuerrillaMail…. it’s a free service that generates “throw-away” email addresses that expire in 15 minutes. Just long enough to validate an account without exposing your real address.
June 20th, 2007 at 4:50 pm
Its not gmail specific, email tags have been around forever. Some systems use +, some use -, others suck and don’t let you use tags at all. More people need to start doing this just to force dumbass web designers/developers to fix their broken “valid email address” checks.
June 22nd, 2007 at 3:52 pm
Oh, I tried that years ago, it got me twice as much spam… (The bloody spammers thought all my +-addresses were different people)