Mannlymama’s Tech Tip of the Week: Infinite Email Addresses

Welcome to my new weekly series on tech tips! Last year I attempted this daily on Twitter but quickly ran out of 140 char sized tips! If you don’t know me, I am life hacker. I love tips to help me automate and optimize life. Blame it on my parents or the 4 years of engineering school but I just love neat tricks to help you do something faster, better or just neater. I’ve worked as a software tester, developer, project manager and, now, social media specialist. My goal with this series is to help you help yourself, one little trick at a time. So without further ado…


Psssst. I am going to let you in on a little testing secret I learned years back. At work, I used to be in charge of testing our accounts system. I would have to test creating, modifying and logging in our product day after day. One dilemma in testing our system was our restriction on email address. You couldn’t create accounts with the same email address. This is a great policy for our user base but when it came to testing, I was kind of stuck. I needed to create a lot but didn’t have infinite email addresses…or so I thought.

A few years into the gig, I learned that Gmail had the power to make a ton of email address aliases from just a single account. EUREKA!

How to Create Infinite Email Addresses with Gmail

Take your normal Gmail address and add “+anythingyouwant” after it. So YouRock@gmail.com can also be YouRock+Roll@gmail.com. All emails will come to your inbox like normal. It’s that simple!

Now you might be saying “I don’t test account systems. Why do I need a bunch of emails?” Well there is a side effect of this: being able to filter your mail on that email address. Want to know when a retailer sells your email address? Tag em! “myemail+potterybarn@gmail.com” will now tell you when Pottery Barn is handing out your email address. Want to know where people are contacting you from? “myemail+linkedin@gmail.com” will now let you know when people found you on LinkedIn. You get the picture.

Also if you’ve already signed up on a site and can’t reuse your email? You can now! {use at your own risk, coupon people}

Gmail is full of fun gems like this. Check out this post for more tips and tools for Gmail!

 

Heads up: if you are an old reader, this may seem familiar. I blogged about this years ago and it is still true! Just bringing it back for the n00bs.

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