paranoiaparadise Blog

Gmail Hidden Tricks

You see! when they say that Gmail is the best, they say it for a reason. Yesterday, the official Gmail blog shared two interesting hidden features about Gmail that most people still don’t know about. The basic story is that when you register an email address with Gmail, say myemail@gmail.com, you get a whole set of multiple email addresses which are a subset of the your base email address.

Gmail Hidden Trick # 1

You can append a plus (”+”) sign and any combination of words or numbers after your email address. Like if you have an email, say myemail@gmail.com, you can use myemail+friends@gmail.com or myemail+office@gmail.com to let users send a mail to your myemail@gmail.com account and then you could set up a filter to automatically star, archive or label emails different incoming emails. Here is a tutorial by Google on how to setup a filter.

Gmail Hidden Trick # 2

You can use one or several dots (”.”) anywhere in your email address. Basically you are allowed to do this because Gmail doesn’t count periods or dots as characters so it would treat your email the same way no matter where you put the dot. For example your email, say myemail@gmail.com, can be used with the following variations

• my.email@gmail.com
• mye.mail@gmail.com
• my.e.mail@gmail.com

and luckily Gmail will recognize and send all the email sent to these addresses to your base account.