Thursday, 6 March 2008

My way cooler email addresses

So it turns out I have an extremely large number of cool email addresses that I didn't even know about. Here is an email I just sent: And wheeee, here it is! For the full details go read the post on the official gmail blog. While coming up with crazy variants on your email address and giving them to people is funny, the linked post points out the real advantage of this behaviour: you can set up filters to label and process your email based on the address it was sent to. I often end up setting filters to hide or simply label certain email that isn't ACTUALLY spam - but now instead of having multiple filters I can just use paul.batum+spam@gmail.com to register for stuff and use a single filter. So what are you waiting for, send me an email at paul.batum+gmail=happy.geek@gmail.com to celebrate this discovery!

Posted by Paul at 9:23 AM
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4 comments:

  1. ok, i'll take the bait :) how do you set up filters to direct mail from your nifty new account name? and (none of my business, really) why put "+ spam" when you sign up for things?

    not a computer nerd, but respect those who are,

    kat
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  2. Wouldn't it be easy for spammers once they know this trick to remove the + sign and anything after and then just get your real address and bypass your filter?
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  3. I guess when I referred to spam, I wasn't exactly clear. I see spam as being two-tiered. There is completely unsolicited email, and then there is email that I recieve that technically I solicited, but am not really interested in reading and having clutter my inbox. Gmail's inbuilt spam filter does an incredible job with the former - I -completely- ignore my spam folder. So to answer Hany's question first, I'm not worried about the 'spammers' - gmail's junk filter has got my back in that regard.

    As for Kim's (Kat's?) question: when somebody sends a email to an address at gmail.com, gmail removes the fullstops before the @ symbol and ignores the + symbol and anything after it. This happens automatically. I don't have a new account name, it turns out that there are many different email addresses that are resolved to mine, such as paulbatum+anexample@gmail.com.

    So, there are some services or websites that I sign up to willingly that are likely to send me stuff I don't really want to read. Before I found out about this trick, I would try to find an option on the website that would say "don't send me stuff", or failing that I would create a specific filter based on the address they sent FROM (sometimes that wouldn't work because they regularly changed the address they sent from!). You can get instructions for setting up filters here The difference now is that I can set up a single filter based on the TO address to catch all the different "solicited but uninteresting" email. My filter will label it accordingly, and then mark it as read and archive it.
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  4. @Hany - was wondering the same; for the dots it works similarly: "Gmail doesn't recognize periods as characters in addresses -- we just ignore them" - so, remove them, and you end up with the original email-address, because: "...you can indeed receive mail at all the variations with dots...".
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