Comments on Paul Batum: My way cooler email addresses

@Hany - was wondering the same; for the dots it wo...

2008-03-10T09:05:00.000+11:00

@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...".

I guess when I referred to spam, I wasn't exactly ...

2008-03-10T08:57:00.000+11:00

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.

Wouldn't it be easy for spammers once they know th...

2008-03-10T00:51:00.000+11:00

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?

ok, i'll take the bait :) how do you set up filte...

2008-03-08T05:32:00.000+11:00

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