philly

I've known of Lifehacker for sometime now, but for some reason, I wasn't a regular reader. I'd constantly click on links from other blogs leading to really cool, and sometimes totally random, life hacks. So, I finally added it to my Google Reader. The hack I will share with my little slice of the world, a GMail hack.

GMail rocks my world. I can access it on my cell phone [Motorola Q], POP'd to my email client [Thunderbird] and of course via webmail. AND it all syncs perfectly. For free. Incredible. And even crazier? Google keeps on upping the size of the inbox, right now the limit is at 2.911GB.

So, the hack… So, you have your GMail address. That one address is infinitely customizable – without registering new ones and having your GMail remotely check them (which it totally can do without a problem). This lifehack post points to a How To on Wired here on getting the most out of GMail. I was aware of all of their tips except for this "+" hack. With your email address, let's say it's gmail@gmail.com, you can add a "+" to the end of your name and whatever you want afterwards… and the address will forward to your original email. So, you can make gmail+signedupforcontest@gmail.com and the confirmation email from that contest will go into your gmail@gmail.com inbox. It'll say gmail+signedupforcontest@gmail.com in the "To" field, but go directly to your inbox. It's crazy. I tested it out from my @comcast.net address to my @gmail.com address.

So, what can you do with this? Well, for one, you can keep tabs on who is selling your email address. Say you sign up for a MoveOn.org thingie with gmail+moveon@gmail.com (I hate those MoveOn fuckers) and then you get spammed at some point for something you didn't want anything to do with and the email address in the "To" field is gmail+moveon@gmail.com. You'll then know that MoveOn.org sold your email address. Brilliant!

Can this be done with other webmail clients? I have no clue. This is really cool and geeky.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2007 @ 12:38 am. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or trackback from your own site. Your comments will be moderated [if you have never previously commented] but will appear as soon as humanly possible.