Disposable email addresses

I've always liked the fact that Yahoo mail provides me with a way to set up disposable email addresses and now I've learned a way to do this in Gmail!

What is a disposable email address? 
Have you ever been in a position where you have to enter an email address (for a competition or some other promotion) but you dread the unwanted marketing that is going to flood your email inbox? Disposable email addresses allow you to receive the email in your inbox, but if you decide you no longer wish to receive the emails, you can simply set up a rule in your inbox to delete all emails coming into that email address.

Why not just unsubscribe from the marketing campaign?
The company who had your email address may sell it on to other similar companies who will then send you emails too! You don't want to spend your time unsubscribing from emails you didn't ask for! Setting up the rule to 'dispose' of any emails that come into your disposable address makes it simple to manage.

How do I create disposable email addresses in Gmail?
You simply add +something after your gmail username. Yes, it's that simple. Here's an example.
If my gmail address is somebody@gmail.com, you simply give out a disposable email address like somebody+anything@gmail.com, or somebody+goaway@gmail.com or somebody+001@gmail.com

Try it on your gmail account and you'll see what I mean.

Now you can sign up for stuff and after the initial novelty has gone from receiving voucher codes, great tips or trivial news, you can simply dispose of it once and for all from your mail box. Simples. :-)

PS I learned the Gmail tip from an LMS supplier whose system requires unique email addresses for each learner. It's much more efficient than setting up disposable emails in Yahoo mail.

(pix from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gmail_logo.png)

google mail

Have just discovered that you have a choice of how to view your Google mail - you can either group all related messages in a thread or choose to have a 'traditional' view of emails as they come in!

Just goes to show that it's worth playing with the settings on any accounts that you might have (email, web 2.0, social networks etc). You may find you have more control than you realised ;-)

One of the things I like most about Google mail (apart from the fact that I can access all my emails, including sent mail anywhere) is that fact that I can 'file' things under multiple 'folders' by tagging them. So if I want to file an email under 'project x' as well as 'theme y', I can! This way, the email will be seen whether I click on the tag 'project x' or the tag 'theme y'. Or you could just search your emails, I guess ;-)