In this very first post of my new blog I’d like to share two very useful filtering tips of GMail. I have been using them for a year (I guess) and finally I am bloging about it :)

One of them is the period or dot (.) in your username. Let’s say my email address is “myname@gmail.com”. Thanks to GMail, all of the dotted versions of my username are also reserved for me, since adding or removing dots from a Gmail address won’t change the actual destination address. So, all of the emails that are sent to any of the email addresses below are basically received by myname@gmail.com

.myname@gmail.com
my.name@gmail.com
myname.@gmail.com
m.y.n.a.m.e@gmail.com
etc

What a helpful trick! So there won’t be any confusion of sending emails with or without the dot, just send it and it will be OK. Moreover, as I said before this can be used as a filtering tool. Just create a filter for any email-dot combination you would like to use, and use it for different websites or friends etc.

Another filtering tip is about the plus sign (+). You can add plus sign and a keyword at the end of your username, and again all of the emails will be delivered to you.

For example you can sign up for a website with myname+website@gmail.com and then you can filter all of the emails come to that address. This might be useful for suspicious websites that you think twice before giving your email address. Cool, huh? :)