Your Gmail can be used over and over again, with no one the wiser.




One Gmail address only. That makes sense. You only have one phone number and one residential address. The same should apply to your email addresses, including Gmail. However, your Gmail account has a limitless number of addresses that you may use at any time, deceiving everyone from Netflix to spammers.

There are actually several options available. The first allows you to convert a single Gmail address into an endless number of addresses through a technique known as "plus addressing" (a fitting name). To utilise plus addressing, simply insert a plus sign (+) after the local-part (the name before the @), followed by the desired information.

If my Gmail account was izaz@gmail.com, for instance, I could put izaz+lifehacker@gmail.com or izaz+gomedia@gmail.com. This email will appear to be a new address to the service you're using it with, but any messages sent to it will still be delivered to your inbox. This works for any Gmail address, regardless of the domain.

On the one hand, it is an excellent method for determining the origin of spam emails. You could develop the habit of using a proper plus address when signing up for services. For example, I could use izaz+facebook@gmail.com to sign up for Facebook or izaz+hulu@gmail.com to create a Hulu account. If I saw a spam letter in my inbox and saw that it was sent from "izaz+facebook@gmail.com," I would know that Facebook had leaked my address to third-party spammers, assuming I had not shared the izaz+facebook address with another service.

On the contrary, it is the ideal temporary email factory for free trials. Don't create a new Gmail account every time you want to watch a free episode. Simply add a new plus address to your account and begin a fresh trial. Using  izaz + thanks for the freecontent@gmail.com and  izaz+roundtwobuckaroo@gmail.com will work just fine. Obviously, this raises a new difficulty if the business requires a unique credit card for each new trial.

It's not only positives, either. Periods are also acceptable here. You could run with any combination of A. izaz@gmail.com, ai.zaz@gmail.com, and izaz@gmail.com that you can imagine.

However, if the service you're signing up for doesn't accept your Gmail plus address, you can attempt another Gmail trick. This time, simply replace "Gmail" with "google mail" (e.g., izaz@googlemail.com as opposed to izaz@gmail.com). Similar to plus addressing, using google mail instead of Gmail tricks the service into believing you're using a brand-new address, yet all incoming google mail emails are delivered to your regular Gmail account.

Plus addressing is not the only option to safeguard your Gmail address from spam and scams. "Hide My Email" services from Duck Duck Go and Apple can be used to create "burner" accounts when signing up for new services that you may not necessarily trust. As with plus addressing, these burner accounts will send all incoming messages to your primary Gmail address, but unlike plus addressing, your primary Gmail address is never revealed. Using izaz+hello@gmail.com is effective, however it still exposes my local-part to the service I am signing up for. Burner accounts provide even more anonymity.

This post was revised on Sunday to include information about the ability to add periods to email addresses. Thank you to rossfeldman for bringing this to our attention.