Your Gmail account has unlimited addresses. So you can use them
Your Gmail account can be used over and over again with changed addresses, without anyone knowing
ByJake Peterson
How to use unlimited Gmail addresses to protect yourself from spam
An email in Gmail has a unique address, right? After all, you have a phone number and a home address . The same should be true for your email addresses, including Gmail. However, it just so happens that your Gmail account has an unlimited number of addresses that you can use whenever you want , fooling everyone from Netflix to spammers .
There are a couple of methods for this . The first is it allows you to convert your single Gmail address into infinite addresses, through a feature called “additional address” (an appropriate name). To take advantage of these other addresses , simply type a plus sign (+) after the base part (the name before the @), and then type whatever you want .
For example, if my Gmail address were jake@gmail.com, I could type jake+lifehacker@gmail.com or jake+gizmodo @gmail.com. The service you’re using that email with will think it’s a completely new address, but any email to that address will be sent to your original inbox . This works for any Gmail address, even if the domain is not gmail.com.
Plus , it’s a great trick to find out where spam emails are coming from. You can get in the habit of applying a more explicit address to whatever service you ‘re signing up for. You could use jake+facebook@gmail.com when signing up for Facebook or jake+hulu@gmail.com when creating a Hulu account, for example. If I were to check a spam message in my inbox and see that it mentions “jake+facebook@gmail.com”, I would know that Facebook was leaking my address to third parties who spam me , as long as I didn’t share the email address. jake+facebook with another service.
On the other hand, it’s the perfect temporary email factory for free trials. Forget opening a new Gmail account every time you want to watch a free show. Simply add a new “ plus” (+) address to your current account and start another trial. Using jake+freetest@gmail.com and jake+otherfreetest@gmail.com will work fine. Of course, if the service requires a unique credit card for each new test, that presents a new challenge.
And it doesn’t just work with addition symbols (+) . Points work too . You could use j.ake@gmail.com, ja.ke@gmail.com, jake@gmail.com, any combination you can think of.
However, if, for some reason, the service you’re signing up for doesn’t accept your “ plus” address , there is another Gmail trick you can try. All you need to do is change the “gmail” part of your address to “ googlemail ” (for example, jake@googlemail.com, instead of jake@gmail.com). As with “plus” addresses , using googlemail instead of gmail tricks the service into thinking you’re using a completely new address, but all incoming email from googlemail will end up in your regular gmail inbox. .
Using “plus” emails isn’t the only way to protect your Gmail address from spam and scammers. You can use DuckDuckGo or Apple ‘s “Hide My Email” services to create “disposable ” accounts when you sign up for new services you don’t necessarily trust . Like “plus” addresses , these disposable accounts will forward all incoming messages to your primary Gmail address, but the benefit is that you never expose tu real Gmail address in the process. Using jake+hello@gmail.com works great, but it still reveals my base part of the email . Disposable accounts offer even greater privacy.
