This Decades-Old Gmail Trick Is Still My Favorite Email Management Hack

Email is a staple of modern life, but it’s also generally awful. If you’re like most people, your inbox is a hellscape mix of expired 2FA codes, spam, and important information you actually need that’s buried under mountains of old junk.

There are plenty of ways to make email a little less painful, though, including a little-known trick Google let us in on in a post on the official Gmail blog way back in 2008. Nearly 20 years later, it’s still one of my favorite email management hacks.

As then-Gmail Associate Product Marketing Manager Robby Stein explained in that 2008 blog post, Gmail allows you to add a plus sign and any combination of letters and numbers to an email address, just before the @, without affecting delivery. So, for example, an email sent to [email protected] will still be delivered to [email protected], same as it would have been without the added “+example.”

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This can be useful in a couple of different ways. It’s a very low-effort security measure when giving your email address over to sketchy places, for one. For example, in the process of troubleshooting my Vizio TV a couple of weeks ago, I had to sign up for a Vizio account. I don’t necessarily trust Walmart-owned Vizio to keep my contact info off third-party mailing lists, so I slapped a +vizio at the end of my Gmail address when signing up.

Now, if I receive any emails from strange sources that are addressed to [email protected], I’ll know how my contact info ended up in those hands. It’s also quick and easy to create a rule that automatically places emails sent to my +vizio address variant directly in the trash, nipping further spam in the bud.

Supercharge your filters

Source: Justin Ward / Android Police

Filtering based on these email variants can be helpful for everyday email management, too. That ancient Gmail blog post uses the example of adding +bank to your address for financial information, then setting up a filter that automatically applies a label to messages addressed to that email variant. Setups like this can group emails of certain types into easily accessed buckets with less work than manually adding multiple sender addresses to a filter.

The biggest hole in this feature is that some website and app email fields don’t see the plus sign as a valid character, kicking back addresses with plusses appended and throwing an error message. But in my experience, most contact forms do allow it.

In his blog post, Stein mentions another interesting tidbit about Gmail: you’re able to add dots between any of the characters in the part of an address that comes before the @ symbol, and much like with the plus-sign hack, they’ll still be delivered as normal.

You can use this to make longer email addresses more legible ([email protected] becomes [email protected]), but it can also be a stand-in for the less commonly accepted plus method if you filter specific dot-infused addresses in certain ways. Unlike the plus sign, I’ve never encountered an email field that rejected entries containing dots.

This will hopefully be outmoded soon

I use these tools all the time, but Google’s cooking up a more nuanced solution. In February, an APK teardown by Android Authority showed that Gmail had an in-development feature called Shielded Email. Shielded Email will let you easily create temporary, anonymized email addresses that forward messages to your primary inbox, obviating the need to use the above plus sign trick when you have to give your email over to something less than trustworthy. Apple’s long offered a similar feature called Hide My Email.

Shielded Email looks like it’ll be particularly easy to use on Android, with the option to generate an email alias baked right into Gboard. Google hasn’t said anything publicly about Shielded Email, though, so we may have more of a wait ahead of us — and it’s possible it’ll be paywalled behind Google One, anyway. Slapping a plus sign in your address works right now, for free. If you’re looking for something to help you organize your email better, give it a shot.