Your Gmail Account Has an Unlimited Number of Addresses
One Gmail, one address. This seems right. After all, you have one phone number and one home address. The same should be true for your email addresses, including Gmail. However, your Gmail account has an unlimited number of addresses that you can use at any time, fooling everyone from Netflix to spammers.
In fact, there are several methods here. First, it’s what allows you to turn your single Gmail address into an infinite number of addresses through a tactic called “plus-addressing” (appropriately named). To use plus addressing, you simply type a plus (+) after the local part (the name before the @), and then type whatever you want.
For example, if my Gmail address was jake@gmail.com, I could enter jake+lifehacker@gmail.com or jake+gomedia@gmail.com. The service you’re using this email with will think it’s a brand new address, but any emails to that address will still go to your inbox. This works for any Gmail address, even if the domain is not gmail.com.
On the one hand, this is a great way to figure out where your spam is coming from. You can get into the habit of applying the corresponding plus address to any service you subscribe to. For example, I could use jake+facebook@gmail.com when signing up for Facebook, or jake+hulu@gmail.com when creating a Hulu account. If I checked the spam message in my inbox and saw that it came from “jake+facebook@gmail.com”, I would know that Facebook shares my address with third parties who spam me if I didn’t share the address jake+facebook with another service.
On the other hand, it’s the perfect temporary email factory for free trials. Forget about creating a new Gmail account every time you want to watch a show for free. Just add a new plus address to your current account and start a new trial. Using jake+thanksforthefreecontent@gmail.com and jake+roundtwobuckaroo@gmail.com will work just fine. Of course, if the service requires a unique credit card for each new trial, this presents a new problem.
However, if for some reason the service you’re subscribing to isn’t accepting your plus address, there’s another Gmail trick you can try. This time, all you need to do is change the “gmail” part of your address to “googlemail” (for example, jake@googlemail.com, not jake@gmail.com). Just like alternate addressing, using googlemail instead of gmail makes the service think you’re using a brand new address, but all incoming googlemail emails will go to your regular gmail inbox.
Also, addressing isn’t the only way to protect your Gmail address from spam and scammers. You can turn to DuckDuckGo or Apple ‘s “Hide My Email” services to create “sign-on” accounts when signing up for new services that you don’t necessarily trust. Like secondary addressing, these account accounts will forward all incoming messages to your primary Gmail address, but the advantage here is that you never reveal your actual Gmail address in the process. Using jake+hello@gmail.com works great, but it still exposes my local part to the service I’m subscribing to. Burner accounts provide even more privacy.