Clean inbox

By Pachi | Jun 17, 2008

We all have been victims of spamming at one time or the other. I must say Gmail does a much better job in identifying spams than Hotmail, Yahoo. Here is why.

Even though we are free of spam, our inbox is almost always flooded with personal mails, subscribed mails - important, not important, academic, entertainment etc. And often we find the inbox filled with a big number of unread mails. Oh ya, we can use filters, but come on, we can’t keep creating filters for each and every website we subscribe to.

And this is where we can use this gmail feature, which I discovered recently.

Say, your address is bill@gmail.com , then bill+anything@gmail.com is an alias of bill@gmail.com , it means that mails sent to bill+gates@gmail.com , bill+clinton@gmail.com, bill+xyz@gmail.com are all delivered to bill@gmail.com.

Combining this feature with Gmail’s filter helps us in organising our mails more effectively, saves time and keeps our inbox clean. Here is how you can do it:

  1. Say you are looking for information about blogging. Create a filter beforehand directing mails addressed to username+blogging@gmail.com to skip inbox and add a label - “blogging”
  2. Now you can use this mail address - username+blogging@gmail.com to create accounts, subscribe to newsletters etc
  3. Similarly, for any other activity, for entertainment, use username+timepass@gmail.com , for academic work, use username+acads@gmail.com etc

By doing so we can subscribe to as many sites we want, without having to create a separate filter for each one of them and still keep the inbox clean. And we need not be afraid to subscribe to services fearing spam.

Oh ya, the only risk is you wont be able to give an excuse that your mail was lost amidst others!

6 Comments so far
  1. ecoli June 18, 2008 11:45 pm

    now, if only if I can figure out how to get my hotmail account and my blogging email to forward to my gmail account, I’d be a happy man.

    It doesn’t appear to work through the easy channels.

  2. Danielle June 20, 2008 11:03 pm

    That’s a great tip!!! I love gmail and learn something new everyday!

    Thanks for sharing the info!

    Danielles last blog post..Improving the Mind - Tip #1

  3. Aditya June 21, 2008 10:36 pm

    isn’t there always the miscellaneous email!
    that we’ve been giving out id’s in all those places already..

    our email id’s are already in so many places, it’s tough to change systems now? yea for those things that we register now onwards! maybe over another 5 yrs it’ll all settle

    when at this topic, even email portability is poor! for phones it’s been worked out. even sending emails from new service can be worked out! wat abt receiving emails!!

    imagine moving out from GMail..

    Adityas last blog post..Chindi Phones!

  4. Komala June 23, 2008 3:08 pm

    Good piece of info. Will try this.

  5. ajey June 23, 2008 5:14 pm

    nice bit of fact google freak.

    ajeys last blog post..1 2 3 or none of the above

  6. Yatin July 6, 2008 11:51 pm

    Nice one dude. another gmail trick to add to your post. If you have a mail account big.boy@gmail.com , then the mail sent to it also gets sent to bigboy@gmail.com . if u create an email address b.i.g.b.o.y@gmail.com, all mail will also be sent to bigboy@gmail.com . Kinda like the ‘.’ isnt really powerful.

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