You can then comfortably share your gmail email address on websites, mailing lists and forums without ever worrying about spam or solving CAPTCHAs.
Gmail Easter Egg 1: GMail allows email aliases and unlike Yahoo mail which lets you create just one extra email alias, GMail lets you create infinite number of aliases.
An email sent to paris.hilton@gmail.com or paris.hilton+fans@gmail.com or paris.hilton+blog@gmail.com will all be redirected to one common email address and that is paris.hilton@gmail.com.
Gmail does not recognize characters after the PLUS symbol but the gmail search filter can distinguish between the different address and you can therefore redirect these email to separats gmail folders or apply different labels.
So all emails with the TO: address as paris.hilton+blog@gmail.com [coming from her blog readers] can be automatically redirected to a blog folder in gmail and she can safely trash them when her inbox is approaching the 2 GB limit.
Gmail Easter Egg 2: Gmail cannot recognize dots or periods in email addresses or the user names - that means an address like paris.hilton@gmail.com is the same as paris.hi.lton@gmail.com or paris...hilton@gmail.com.
This is actually a bug than a feature but you can again exploit it to have different kind of email address in your forum signatures.
Keep in mind that hyphens (-) and underscores (_) can't be used in a Gmail address. Also, gmail user names are case insensitive, so it doesn't matter if you enter upper case or lower case letters.
Find this article at: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/09/gmail-easter-eggs-dot-blindess-email.html
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
The tip of the "+" in the address is known since a while, but it's really useless, because many websites don't allow you to put the character "+" in a form...
Written on 7/9/06 7:37 PM
I agree with TOMHTML, the '+' in the address is most effective when using it to send emails to yourself or to your alternate gmail account just so the content can be filed in its relevant label/tag as part of archiving info or a GTD process. Most sites are not able to handle the '+' and usually return an error message.
The 'dot-blindness' may allow for another option at an alias. But it has surely to be accepted as a bug. I have personal experience with this. I have a gmail account in the following format: firstname.lastname@gmail.com. However, I have been receiving - private and personal emails intended for firstnamelastname@gmail.com. Which makes me wonder if emails intended for firstname.lastname@gmail.com do not, due to this bug, end up in firstnamelastname@gmail.com.
Google has been notified about this, but it appears not to have been addressed as yet.
I am a strong fan of all things Google, but things like this show that Just because it's google, doesn't mean it's correct!!
Written on 8/9/06 2:07 AM
The "+" address is not spamproof by any means. How hard is it for a spambot to figure out your real email address from "username+xyz@gmail.com"? The real application is to make filtering easier.
Yahoo has a better spam solution, but you have to be a paid mail subscriber to use it. You can create infinite disposable email addresses, in the form of "alias-xyz@yahoo.com". The difference is that the "alias" is DIFFERENT than your real mail username. And you can delete a disposable email address (so that it bounces), if you start getting spam there.
Written on 8/9/06 2:08 AM