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

Contributor Icon Contributed by MickeyMouse  
Tag Icon 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.

 

4 Comments -


  1. D.B. Cooper said on September 11, 2009

    Would this work?
    When you first start using gmail, give everyone you like your new address as:
    myaddress+6342@gmail.com
    Then filter out mail addressed to myaddress@gmail.com to be labeled spam.
    Use myaddress@gmail.com when you register at sites that you don’t want to give your real address to.
    You would still have the option to give other alias plus addresses if for some reason you wanted to track spread of a particular address to spam lists.
    The spammers who eventually catch on to stripping off the plus part of gmail addresses would be stymied.
    If your +6342 address started getting spam, you would have to change to a new plus suffix and let everyone know, but I guess you would have to do that with any address.
    Do you think using myaddress+____ would have more of a tendency to stay spam free even after the spamlist starts stripping off the plus suffixes?

  2. Dan said on January 24, 2010

    GMail will not let you create an account with and address with “+” in it.

  3. Anonymous said on January 25, 2010

    He means create for example, account@gmail.com, then give all of your contacts an address like account+myname@gmail.com. Then if you give websites an address like account+spam@gmail.com, even if they delete the +spam part, account@gmail.com will still be filtered out from his regular mail.

  4. Paul said on February 22, 2010

    More detailed information on this phenomenon:

    http://www.faqs.org/faqs/mail/addressing/
    http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5233
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_address#Sub-addressing

 

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