How To Use Plus Addressing in Google Gmail

In this Episode: Take Control of Gmail Like a Ninja. Gmail has a cool feature that allows you to filter, organize and control your account appropriately. This special feature is known as Plus Addressing.

TRANSCRIPT:

This is not a new feature by any means, it was blogged about on Google’s Official Gmail blog site way back in March of 2008, but which I only recently discovered.

Plus Addressing works like this, when signing up to a particular site, be it a banking, shopping, Auction or social network to name a few or even when giving out your email at say a convention, by adding a plus sign (+) and any combination of words and numbers immediately after your primary email name, you are able to control how your email is rooted.

Basically, Gmail does not recognize the plus sign (+) or anything after it, so whatever name you select will be directed to your primary email account, where you are then able to assign filters as to how the plus addressing alias gets rooted when arriving to your inbox. Add Filters to automatically Archive, Trash, Star, Forward to another email or mark as important.

Plus Addressing Format:

PrimaryEmailAccount+Alias@gmail.com gets rooted to PrimaryEmailAccount@gmail.com

This is best illustrated by a demo.

So, Let’s Get Started.

Here’s the scenario, you visit the following fictitious websites named: 123AcmeBank.com and 123AcmeSoftware.com and request information from their contact page by leaving your email address.

Using Plus addressing, you leave your contact emails to the appropriate site in the following format:

macstudioa+123AcmeBank@gmail.com and macstudioa+123AcmeSoftware@gmail.com

Shortly after submitting your contact email to 123AcmeSoftware.com, you are made aware that 123AcmeSoftware is not a reputable company.

You therefore decide to filter all emails addressed to macstudioa+123AcmeSoftware@gmail.com to be automatically deleted.

Furthermore, all emails addressed to macstudioa+123AcmeBank@gmail.com to be filtered as important, starred and moved automatically to the folder labeled +123AcmeBank.

Note, you don’t need to add a plus sign for the labeled folder, I just do so in order to know where I have used Plus addressing.

I will now send emails to the Plus addressing accounts to make sure the filters assigned works.

As Shown, after setting the filters for the appropriate plus addressing accounts, email addressed to  macstudioa+123AcmeSoftware@gmail.com is automatically thrown in the Trash and to macstudioa+123AcmeBank@gmail.com is Starred, Marked as important and moved to the +123AcmeBank folder automatically.

And that’s all there is to it, Gmail Plus Addressing allows you to filter, organize and control your Gmail account like a Ninja.


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