Your gmail address is fairly flexible. Suppose your address is
foobar(a)gmail.com
You would receive mail sent to
- fo.obar(a)gmail.com
- f.o.o.b.a.r(a)gmail.com
- foobar+flotsom(a)gmail.com
- foo.bar+flotsom(a)gmail.com
So if you sign up at
amazon.com <http://amazon.com> with your
foobar(a)gmail.com e-mail account, you use foobar+amazon(a)gmail.com. Then you
check the address that your spam was sent to, and if it is from
foobar+amazon(a)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(a)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(a)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(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 7/17/05, Brian <reflection(a)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.com><http://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
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http://endeavour.zapto.org/astro73/
Thank you to JosephM for inviting me to Gmail!
Have lots of invites. Gmail now has 2GB.