Dot and plus trick with Gmail

Say your Google GMail address is alexsmith@gmail.com,
you can use any of the email addresses listed below which will still send email to alexsmith@gmail.com.

bagayan@gmail.com
 …
 …
 bagayan@gmail.com
 ba.gayan@gmail.com
 b.a.g.a.y.a.n@gmail.com
 …
 …
 bagayan+askstudent@gmail.com
 ba.gayan+cmu@gmail.com
 ba.gaya.n+gamegroup@gmail.com
 bagayan+anythingyouwant@gmail.com

If you notice from above, you can put any number of dots in your email address and it would still go to your primary GMail account.

 Also, if you add text after your GMail user id with a ‘+” such as alexsmith+cmu@gmail.com,
 it will still be forwarded to bagayan@gmail.com.

So, how is this useful:

1. Use this to tag and filter your emails.

I am subscribed to a mailing list from my school. So, for my email, I use bagayan+cmu@gmail.com.
I then filter and tag my email coming to this email address.
Similarly, you can use different variations of your Gmail and then filter your email based on the ‘sent to’ address.
Say ba.gayan@gmail.com for companies I apply to for jobs and bagayan@gmail.com to my buddies and family.
You get the picture.

2. Email Security

Have you wondered which of those sites you might have subscribed to are selling your email address,
filling up your Inbox with Spam. Well, now you can use the append feature to track your subscriptions.
Say you are getting Spam being sent to bagayan+shadysite@gmail.com,
you know which site is selling out your email address. You can also use this to block a subscription or a mailing list.

3. One Time Email address

If you need to create an email id to subscribe to something or need a valid email for confirmation of a service,
you can also use the append feature to create a one time email id. Say bagayan+blah@gmail.com.
After, you confirm your email, you can filter out bagayan+blah@gmail.com to go to trash from then onwards.