Neat little GMail trick
I learned something rather cool today, and whenever I learn something, I like to share it.
I'm sure everyone is aware of this and I'm the last one to learn about it, but it's cool anyways. Let's say your GMail (or Google Apps account) is example@gmail.com. You can create customized addresses for each mailing list, or page you sign up for (for separation, or to see if anyone is selling your address) by using + in your email.
Example:
example+computerdefense.org@gmail.com will still be delivered to example@gmail.com, however it will contain that unique identifier in the address. This allows you to identify spam that computerdefense.org may generate (of course, that would never happen), or to distinguish incoming email.
Another potential use (especially on the Google Apps side) is for a small business with a sales office. Let's say you have 20 customers, you could easily distinguish between mail from each customer by giving them the following addresses sales+customer1@mybusiness.com, sales+customer2@mybusiness.com, etc.
As I said, this is probably old news... but it's new to me, so I figured I'd share.
Yeah it's a really neat trick
Great for signing up to mailing-lists or for signing up to almost anything which you may believe to be dodgy.
Not a gmail specific thing. Its actually described in the RFC.
the plus trick is actually of very little use in stopping spam… all the information needed to arrive at your base email address must still be included and it's trivial to write code to strip out the extraneous bits… there's literally no reason why email harvesting tools wouldn't already have such functionality built in…
i wrote about this last summer in "how not to fight spam with gmail"…