For a Gmail web email account (this didn’t work for my Yahoo or Outlook Exchange test emails), you can receive emails via email address alias strings to better organize your emails.

Consider “someone.blog@gmail.com“:
* put the “.” or “+” characters anywhere in the name, such as “s.o.m.e.oneblog@gmail.com” etc
* use “+” to put a string after the “someoneblog” part such as: “some+one.blog+HelloWorld@gmail.com” etc
* use either “@gmail.com” or “@googlemail.com“, such as “someone.blog+wordpress@googlemail.com”

Use these variations to organize where an automated email came from. For ex, if you register an account at www.websiteA.com, then register the email “someone.blog+websiteA@googlemail.com“. Use rules to auto-organize your emails (or search them, or filter junk email) based on the “To:” address instead of (or in addition to) the “From:” address. This may also help you know where any unwanted spam comes from.

Some websites might not let you register with the “+” in your email. You can still broadly categorize even those emails as (“@gmail” as your website registration email) vs. (“@googlemail” as your email for personal contacts), but make sure you trust the website because spammers can easily email you at both @gmail and @googlemail.

The spammers could generically auto-remove “+” and “.” and anything after the last “+”, but you could counter that by blocking (filtering) all emails that don’t have a “+”. Then give your email out with “+”’s, and have your filters count any emails you get without a “+” in the “To:” field as spam. So you would only count an email as a personal email if they sent it to, for ex, “someone.blog+personal@gmail.com”.

Using a string like “+personal” (or “+fj1830f30kfdasjfioa”) is like requiring a password for someone to send you an email. Even if the spammer knows “someone.blog@gmail.com”, there are too many possible strings for them to spam every variation of “someone.blog+[variation strings]@gmail.com”.

You should also have at least 2 different email accounts (one for personal contacts and one for registering accounts), and probably more than 2. You could easily have at least 4 emails (1 personal, 1 work, 2 to register accounts – one for companies you trust like a bank or credit card or auto-insurance and the other for any less important websites that might spam you).

For anyone with at least one Gmail email account, aliases with “.” and “+” and “@googlemail” give you additional options to better organize and filter your emails.

Pem (Admin) :: 2008/04/04 (Friday, April 4, 2008) :: Communication: email, IM, social network, etc :: No Comments »