You probably don't know that with your Gmail account you can have as many email addresses as you want. This information may be necessary if you want to “trick” certain services that could then send spam to your “official” account. With this method, the so-called “plus address” will be able to use your Gmail in a different way, without anyone knowing.
No Lessfios Office today we are going to show you another huge feature of the many that gmail already provides. Then use your imagination to get even more profitability from this functionality.
One Gmail, one address. This seems the most logical. After all, you have a phone number and a home address. The same must be valid for your email addresses, including Gmail. However, by chance, your Gmail account has an unlimited number of addresses that you can use whenever you want, in order to “trick” some services and even spammers.
In fact, there are some methods here. The first is what allows you to turn your single Gmail address into infinite addresses, through a tactic called “more addressing” (an apt name). To take advantage of “More” addressing, just write a plus (+) after the local part (the name before the @), and then type whatever you want.
For example, if my Gmail address was [email protected], I could write [email protected], or [email protected]. The service you are using this email with will think it is a completely new address, but any and all email messages sent to these addresses will end up in the only inbox, the [email protected].
Yes, this works for any Gmail address, even if the domain is not gmail.com.
But how can this Gmail feature be useful to us?
Well, we can have several interesting uses. On the one hand, it's a great trick for finding out where your spam emails are coming from. You can get into the habit of applying a more appropriate address to whatever service you are signing up for.
So let's suppose we use [email protected] when subscribing to a Facebook account, or [email protected] when creating a Spotify account, for example. If I checked my inbox for spam, and saw that it came from “[email protected]”, I would know that Facebook was disclosing my address to third parties who were spamming me, as long as I didn't share my address [email protected] with another service.
Yes, this trick could be a temporary address factory, a perfect method when we want to have access to something free to just test if it's worth it.
This would mean that we wouldn't have to open new Gmail accounts whenever we needed “another email account”, for example. Just add a new address to your checking account and start another try.
Using [email protected] e [email protected] We can have a temporary account and even be nice. Obviously this method is used when we are only asked for an email address to confirm our identity.
This is so interesting that we can even create email addresses to control devices in our home. An example could be add one of these addresses with IFTTT mechanics. So, if you happen to have the address [email protected] As a “Send email as” alias in Gmail settings, we can set up an IFTTT trigger that activates whenever an email appears from that address.
Wherever you are, send an email to this address [email protected] the lights will be turned on. Simple and functional, right?
In addition to the plus sign (+), use the period (.)
Gmail even allows you to use the dot. So, I can create an email like [email protected], or something even more subtle, like [email protected]. Well, imagination is heaven.
However, if for some reason the service you're signing up for doesn't accept your positive address, there's another Gmail trick to try. This time, all you need to do is change the “Gmail” part of your address to “googlemail” (e.g. [email protected], rather than [email protected]).
Like plus (+) addressing, using googlemail instead of Gmail makes the service think it's using an entirely new address, but all emails received from googlemail will end up in your regular Gmail inbox.
If the idea is to protect our true address by hiding it, then we can expand the range of offers. This is because in addition to these Gmail tricks, we can also protect ourselves against spam and scammers by using the services “Hide My Email” by DuckDuckGo or Apple to create “mask” accounts when signing up for new services that you don’t necessarily trust.
Just like addressing, these “mask” accounts will forward all incoming messages to your primary Gmail address, but the benefit here is that you never expose your real Gmail address in the process. Use [email protected] it works very well, but it still reveals the local part of me to the service I'm signing up for. Mask accounts offer even more privacy.
____________________________________________________
This was today's MenosFios Office, where we ask our readers to comment and contribute with additional information they deem necessary on this same topic.
Any and all questions you would like to see answered here should be posted on the exclusive communication channel dedicated to the Menos Fios office.
We are talking about the email created for this purpose: [email protected]. This is the only reception point for the questions you send us. Use it to send us your questions, doubts or problems. Your answer will come out very soon.
