Your Gmail account contains unlimited addresses

One Gmail, one address. That seems right. After all, you have one phone number and one home address. The same should be true for your email addressesGmail included. As it happens, though, your Gmail account has an unlimited number of addresses that you can use whenever you want, fooling everyone from Netflix to spammers alike.

There are actually two ways here. The first is what allows you to convert your single Gmail address into infinite addresses, through a tactic called “plus addressing” (properly named). To take advantage of the additional addressing, just type the plus sign (+) after the local part (the name before the @), then type in your own.

For example, if my Gmail address is [email protected], I can type [email protected] or [email protected]. The service you use this email with will think it’s a brand new address, but any emails to that address will still be sent to your inbox. This works for any Gmail address, even if the domain isn’t gmail.com.

On the other hand, it is a great trick to know the source of spam emails. You can get used to applying a proper plus address for whatever service you sign up for. I use [email protected] when signing up for Facebook or [email protected] when creating a Hulu account, for example. If I were to check a spam message in my inbox, and see that it came from “[email protected]”, I would know that Facebook was leaking my address to third parties who were spamming me, as long as I wasn’t sharing an address jake + facebook with another service.

On the other hand, it is the perfect temporary email factory for free trials. No need to open a new Gmail account every time you want to watch a free show. Simply add a new plus address to your existing account and start another experience. Using [email protected] and [email protected] will work fine. Of course, if the service requires a unique credit card for each new experience, that presents a new challenge.

However, if, for some reason, the service you subscribe to no Accept your additional address Here’s another Gmail trick to try. This time, all you need to do is change the “gmail” part of your address to “googlemail” (ie, [email protected] , instead of [email protected]). Just like the extra address, using googlemail instead of gmail tricks the service into thinking you’re using a brand new address, but all emails from googlemail will end up in your regular gmail inbox.

Plus, processing is not the only way to protect your Gmail address from spam and scammers. You can refer to Hide My Email services at DuckDuckGo or apple To create “burner” accounts when you sign up for new services that you don’t necessarily trust. Like the additional address, these burner accounts will forward all incoming messages to your main Gmail address, but the advantage here is that you won’t be exposing your actual Gmail address in the process. Using [email protected] works great, but… Do I still disclose my local part of the service I’m subscribed to. Burner accounts provide greater privacy.