Your gmail address is fairly flexible. Suppose your address is foobar@gmail.com
You would receive mail sent to
- fo.obar@gmail.com - f.o.o.b.a.r@gmail.com - foobar+flotsom@gmail.com - foo.bar+flotsom@gmail.com
So if you sign up at amazon.com http://amazon.com with your foobar@gmail.com e-mail account, you use foobar+amazon@gmail.com. Then you check the address that your spam was sent to, and if it is from foobar+amazon@gmail.com (highly unlikely as it is), you can take action from there, including sending an upset letter, closing your account with them, and automatically nuking all of the e-mails sent to that address with a filter.
It's also useful for categorizing mail by address. Want to make sure you don't miss an important e-mail from a friend? Give them foobar+jeff@gmail.com, and set up a filter to automatically star messages sent to that address.
This doesn't work quite as well on mailing lists. Suppose you signed up here with foobar+wikitech-l@gmail.com. Then, everytime you want to post to the list you need to go into your settings and change your reply-to address before and after you send the mail. If you're already typing the message, you have to open a new window and set it (or save your e-mail as a draft and navigate away from it).
I might put together a greasemonkey script that makes this functionality more accessible by adding an extra field before To: that says From:
If you use an external client that supports this functionality, Gmail will let you send mail from any address via an SMTP server. It's not that it's a bad feature, just that it's inaccessible (likely intentionally).
/Alterego
On 7/18/05, Jamie Bliss astronouth7303@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/17/05, Brian reflection@gmail.com wrote:
When I sign up for a commercial website, I use the + gmail operator so
that
I know if they sell my address. For instance, if I sign up at foobar.com http://foobar.comhttp://foobar.com, I would use reflection+foobar@. Then when I start getting spam I know
where
it came from. Since this is a mailing list, it's a pain in my rear to
change
my displayed address everytime I want to say something to reflection+wikitech-l@, so I had to use the base address of just
reflection.
When you do a google search for my e-mail address, the only results are
from
this mailing list. (a couple others are similar, but not mine). That
means
that the 2-3 spam messages I get per day on this relatively new address
are
from this mailing list.
the + gmail operator? Can you explain? Or send a link?
-- Jamie
http://endeavour.zapto.org/astro73/ Thank you to JosephM for inviting me to Gmail! Have lots of invites. Gmail now has 2GB.
Interesting. I just tried it to register for a cisco meeting, and the validation routine rejected my using a "+" in my email though :(
On 7/19/05, Brian reflection@gmail.com wrote:
Your gmail address is fairly flexible. Suppose your address is foobar@gmail.com
You would receive mail sent to
- fo.obar@gmail.com
- f.o.o.b.a.r@gmail.com
- foobar+flotsom@gmail.com
- foo.bar+flotsom@gmail.com
Interesting. I just tried it to register for a cisco meeting, and the validation routine rejected my using a "+" in my email though :(
That's because their script is broken. I'm of the mind that *properly* validating an email address is very hard to do, and people should instead move to "send an email, click to activate" system.
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