Really cool gmail hack

[miekec]

When you give your email address to a website, you hope that they don't sell or trade your address to a bunch of spammers. Well if they do, here is a simple way to see what sites are responsible for what particular piece of email. This requires you have a Gmail account.

If your Gmail login name was username@gmail.com and you went to samplesite.com to fill out a registration form, instead of just entering username@gmail.com as your email, enter it as username+samplesitecom@gmail.com instead. When Gmail sees a "+" in an email address, it uses all the characters to the left of the plus sign to know who to send it to. In this example it would still send it to username@gmail.com.

Now whats cool is if you search Gmail for username+samplesitecom, you will see all massages that were sent to that email address.

To see who is responsible for sending a specific message click the Show Details link and you will see the complete address.

(from http://www.hedir.com/introduction/about17942.html)

Comments

[zigamorph.livejournal.com]

This is not specific to GMail. In fact, GMail is simply copying a system used for decades and available in very widely used message transfer agents (MTAs) such as Sendmail and message delivery agents (MDAs) such as Procmail. The generic term is a "plussed address" because the plus sign is used as a delimiter.

The original idea, long before spam was a problem, was to allow automated sorting into separate mailbox files/folders. For example, one could subscribe to an e-mail list with an address such as "zigamorph+abcdef@livejournal.com" and the messages so addressed would upon receipt be stored in a separate file/folder called "abcdef" for separate review. GMail supports sorting rules that can automatically apply "labels" based upon the plussed component, which has essentially the same function.

[miekec]

Hunh. Fancy that - I had no clue. Would have used it a hell of a lot sooner...