If you have a Gmail account, you can take advantage of a feature known as plus addressing. Plus addressing, as the name implies, allows you to append a plus sign, followed by any series of letters and/or numbers, to your email address. This can come in handy if you want to determine who is sharing your email address or if you want to create special rules to route emails to different folders in your inbox.
For example, if your email address is JohnSmith@gmail.com and you are signing up for an account at Company123, instead of providing your regular email address, you can provide JohnSmith+Company123@gmail.com. All emails with plus addressing will still be sent to JohnSmith@gmail.com. However, if you later receive spam emails with that plus address, it will be obvious that Company123 shared your email address with them.
As another example, you can use plus addressing along with Gmail filters to automatically apply labels or to categories your emails. Let’s say that you want to add your name to the email distribution list for your child’s elementary school. You could submit JohnSmith+Elementary@gmail.com as your email address and then create a filter (or category) as shown in the next 2 images.
Perhaps a lesser known but related feature is dot addressing in which you have the option to add periods anywhere in your email address. Periods in Gmail addresses are simply ignored, so you can add any permutation of periods such as John.Smith@gmail.com or J.o.h.n.S.m.i.t.h@gmail.com. The same filters and categories can be applied to your dot addresses.
Read more in this Gmail blog. Have you found other uses for Gmail plus addressing or dot addressing? If so, let me know how you’ve taken advantage of these features.
