Use GMail Plus-Addressing to Generate Throw-Away E-Mail Addresses

Contributed by MickeyMouse August 31, 2005  
Tagged: Google

Use the Plus-Addressing option on your gmail account to generate disposable email addresses.

Do not use this service from your main gmail account. Eventually this trick will stop working, and your account will be flooded with spam. You’ve got to do something with all those gmail invites, right?

How many services use email and email validation to use?
Forums, free i-tunes, free magazines, free this, and free that…

You know many of these services make money off selling your email address; therefore, you certainly do not want to give them your main email address. Thus the need for throw-away or disposable email addresses. Although many services out there offer this service, gmail is an especially useful tool.

From wikipedia re Gmail–

Gmail also supports “plus-addressing” of emails. Messages can be sent to addresses in the form: gmail.user+extratext@gmail.com where extratext can be any string. Plus-addressing allows users to sign up for different services with different aliases and then easily filter all e-mails from those services. It does not appear, however, that the +string feature works when sending email from a gmail account to itself. Additionally (in some cases) the string appended to the e-mail address may not be longer than six characters.

If you gmail account is throwaway@gmail.com… then you can generate additional email accounts by adding text after the plus…

Original Account:
- throwaway@gmail.com

New Accounts:
- throwaway+dumpa@gmail.com
- throwaway+dumpb@gmail.com
- etc.

By using gmail’s filtering function with your unique text (dumpa, dumpb, etc.), you can automatically archive these messages if they start getting spammy.

This likely will not work forever. Spammer and websites will soon learn to filter and remove this plus-addressing text. That’s one of the advantages of gmail… you can always sign up for another account.