The most useful usage of a single character +on@ the internet
Twenty seven percent of all emails sent around the world are opened using Gmail, that’s 1.5 billion users and it's imperative that you are all aware of this feature.
Let’s imagine my email address is:
Michael.On.Medium@gmail.com
Gmail allows anyone or any system sending an email to this account to append after the address the + symbol followed by any combination of characters, for example:
Michael.On.Medium+Blogger.No1@gmail.com
The email will arrive at Gmail and the plus symbol and anything following it will simply be ignored and the email will be received by the correct account i.e Michael.On.Medium@gmail.com.
The best bit is when you open the email in Gmail it still gets populated with the actual TO details used, for example:
This brings us to the most useful feature of all this. Let’s say you are presented with that all to familiar sign up page, at some random site called QuestionableCompany.com. You might then enter your email address as
Michael.On.Medium+Questionable.Company@gmail.com
Two things you can do with this. If an email ever comes in from another site or company sent to Michael.On.Medium+Questionable.Company@gmail.com then you know they have been sharing your email address with 3rd parties. Secondly you can setup a filter and either mark all emails to this address as “Spam” or with a label such as “Questionable Emails”, hence keeping your inbox nice and clean.
Another very useful feature is let's say you signed up to a company which had offered you a three day trial. A few days later you forgot to try it out. Very annoying! You can beg for an extension, or simply sign up again with for example Michael.On.Medium+more.trial@gmail.com. Job done, this is a completely new account and you are good to go!
In fact if you are pedantic and better if you use a decent password manager, why not append a unique ID every time you signup or register your email address? For example:
Michael.On.Medium+7ghd2hb3d8sb@gmail.com
By using a password manager in the same way it stores your password it will store your email address with the unique ID associated with that signup.
If you were to try achieve any of the above functionality not using the + symbol you would have to create a new email account every time which as we know can be slow and tiresome, and feels very redundant.
What started me using this feature myself was for software development purposes. When testing the signup process of an app I had been working on, I initially had to create and use numerous email accounts, whilst logging in and out of each one endlessly. This feature has saved A LOT of time!
One last thing in case you missed it the dots in any Gmail address are completely ignored, so if you prefer you could give out your address as MichaelOnMedium@gmail.com. However, be careful if you forget you signed up without the dots and later try with them as you may find that your account appears to not be registered!
Enjoy!
