I read about this (obscure) little trick the other day and I have to say that I have found it very useful already.

To your gmail address, add +XXXX when you use it to register somewhere online or buy something, or give out for raffles, etc. Number of +chars does not seem to matter.

You would do: [email protected] for example (not that I'm saying the NYT would sell your email).

Mail will get seamlessly routed to your gmail inbox. If you ever start getting major spam to +NYT, you can automatically route all +NYT mail to the trash or spam folder and change it to something else at the site. You also know who sold your email ID!

Same goes if you have a blog w/ an email contact there: [email protected].

It saves keeping up w/ numerous Hotmail or other accounts -- all you have to do is manage one now. Very slick! ^

Very slick... but I've found a lot of places won't allow + when filling in web forms.

Another interesting trick is that a dot in the username can be put in wherever you want it. For instance, if your account is [email protected], e-mails can be sent to firstlast@gmail, or even f.i.r.s.t.l.a.s.t@gmail.

Good one!

I can use that for sites that won't take a +. ^

The "+" option is a standard feature of email, but not everyone knows about it (hence the problems with certain web forms). I've used the "+" tag with my Earthlink account for the past few years. Sadly, spammers are savvy enough to strip off the tags to prevent you from easily determining where they obtained your email address.

In my 20 years of IT and email, that's the first I have heard of it!

I wonder why Gmail allows it and none of my other providers -- corp Exchange, Yahoo! and MSN/Hotmail shut it down?!

Could you please point to an RFC or standard for all our edification & enlightenment!

Interestingly enough, RFC 822/2822 are quite liberal when it comes to defining the e-mail address format.

As per RFC 2822, "3.4. Address Specification" and the definitions contained in "3.2.4. Atom", valid characters for an e-mail address are:

• A-Z
• a-z
• 0-9
• ! # $ % & ' * + - / = ? ^ _ ` { | } ~
• .

But that's just in theory. In practice, I wouldn't use anything other than "-", "_", and "."

But Yahoo mail does have this feature (at least for premium users).

Yahoo's feature (I think it requires Yahoo Mail Plus) is perhaps a better approach: If your Yahoo email address is "[email protected]", you create a base name that has nothing to do with your email address, like "FTguy". You then create disposable email addresses by appending any additional keywords to the base name, like "[email protected]". This way the disposable address can't be mangled back to your real address. Yahoo requires that the base name be different from your email address.

ahhh... on the same note, this explains why I'm suddenly receiving Spam mail in my gmail account (haven't used it for commercial email exchange at all!).. all the spam mail is addressed to addresses that match the first 5 letters of my gmail address.. for example:

[email protected] ---> [email protected], [email protected], etc.

izzik... that's just standard spammer stuff. Pick a name and add to it. Bill, Billa, Billand, etc.

SBC DSL, which uses Yahoo!, supports those throw-away emails too. But I have to then set up an account (or a forward) to check them also, or hassle w/ the web-view.

W/ Gmail, it all automatically ends up in Outlook via POP3 no matter what I use -- much less hassle.

KVS... thanks for the RFC, but that doesn't explain how a +xxx still gets to me w/o bouncing back to the sender. If + is valid, then name+xxx could be another valid email and I would never get it. Unless I am missing something...

<name> & <name+xxx> are different e-mail addresses. It's the GMail's incoming servers that are set-up in a way that routes all incoming mail for <name+xxx> to the <name> mailbox.

I have hundreds of spams emails in Google, and I've never given it to anybody! All follow this basic premise: spammers are randomly trying every email variant they can think of. Perhaps because I got a Google account early enough to get an actual word (no, it's not "pinniped") I get more hits.

To Google's credit: my inbox is totally clean. My Spam box has all of the messages. A brief perusal of the spam makes me think it was truly random: not a result of Google spying on any of my actual email traffic.

Or, on the social engineering front, some spammer paid a low-level Google employee (hired post-IPO ) a couple thousand bucks for the directory?

because google has the brightest minds