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. Here’s how it works: say your address is pinkyrocks@gmail.com, and
you want to automatically label all workMore real world examples:
Find out who is spamming you: Be sure to use plus-addressing for every form you fill out online and give each site a different plus address.
Example: You could use
pinkyrocks+nytimes@gmail.com for nytimes.compinkyrocks+freestuff@gmail.com for freestuff.comThen you can tell which site has given your e-mail address to spammers, and automatically send them to the trash.
Automatically label your incoming mail:
I’ve talked about that above.Archive your mail: If you receive periodic updates about your bank account balance or are subscribed to a lot of mailing lists that you don’t check often, then you can send that sort of mail to the archives and bypass your Inbox.
Example: For the mailing list, you could give
pinkyrocks+mailinglist1@gmail.com as your address, and assign a filter that will archive mail to that address automatically. Then you can just check in once in a while on the archive if you want to catch up.
Update (9/7) :
Several commentors have indicated that this is not a Gmail specific trick. kl says Fastmail has enabled this feature as well. caliban10 reports that a lot of sites reject addresses with a plus sign. You might use other services like Mailinator for disposable addresses instead. pbinder recommends using services like SpamGourmet, which redirects mail to your real address.
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