Saturday, July 26, 2008

Email Fun

I found this at the GeekSugar site.

Did you know the periods in your gmail address don't mean a thing? That's right, if you signed up as geek.sugar@gmail.com, you'd still get emails sent to geeksugar@gmail.com. You'll even get emails sent to g.e.e.k.s.u.g.a.r@gmail.com, for the wiseacres in your family. Ooh, and anything sent to "googlemail" instead of "gmail." Honestly, it's the little things that blow my mind (and btw, none of the above email addresses belong to us!).

More usefully, you can add a plus sign to the end of your address, and then you can set up a folders in your email that coordinate with that. For instance, say you open an online account with WellsFargo. When you sign up, give your email address as "geeksugar+banking@gmail.com", then in Settings, set up a filter. In the From box, add in WellsFargo or your chosen bank, in the To box, put in your newly-created geeksugar+banking@gmail.com address, and the set the filter to put in a folder titled "banking." You can also use this technique when you sign up for something and send their emails to you directly to the trash!

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Erm, that's not exactly true. "carolyn.ann.grant@gmail.com" is a different identifier - as far as Google is concerned - to "carolynanngrant@gmail.com".

The gmail/googlemail thing is true for some - but as the "googlemail" domain isn't in active use, Google wants you to use gmail, it'll all go away. (I investigated something similar, a few years ago, and it's a reference in a file.)

I'm not quite sure how she's getting to those points.

Carolyn Ann

Unknown said...

Oh - the plus thing works only if your email client recognizes that format! And the database you're sending the email to isn't stripping that sort of information away.

Carolyn Ann

Cerulean Bill said...

Doncha love it when people leave out those little gotchas in their tech descriptions?

Thanks, CA.

Angie said...

I also understood that emails sent to nospam@gmail.com and no.spam@gmail.com would both get to the same mailbox.

Cerulean Bill said...

Well, based on what CA says (above), it only works on clients. So it might not work -- but if it does, it's cool. Like when I first saw someone sending a fax directly to an email client -- wowsers. I'm still impressed by that, and it was several years ago.