Gmail tracking tricks

As you know by now, I use and highly recommend Gmail - Google's free email service. I could probably do several month's worth of weekly tips on things you can do with your Gmail account. But this week, I want to tell you about two of the most valuable tricks available.

Trick #1
Let's say my email address is pctutor@gmail.com (which it is!). Gmail allows you to use dots in between the characters of the user name portion (that's the part to the left of the @ sign). So - any email that gets sent to:

pc.tutor@gmail.com
p.c.tutor@gmail.com
pct.u.t.o.r@gmail.com
or even
p.c.t.u.t.o.r@gmail.com

would still end up at my regular email account, pctutor@gmail.com. Even though you only signed up for one Gmail account, you effectively have several accounts by using this feature. You can use one configuration for work, one for home, one for school, etc. and you still only have to check that one email account to receive all of them.

Trick #2
This one is really cool. You can use the "+" sign after your user name and enter anything you want after that, and the email will still get to your original account. So, next time you are at a website that requires you to put in an email address to register, you don't have to worry about them spamming you because you can enter your email address like this:

pctutor+flakywebsite@gmail.com

If you wanted to get really fancy, you can use a different word or number (or combination) every time you give out your email address, then track which site or company sold your email to some spammer. Then, just tell Gmail to automatically delete any emails that contain that code.

This week's video will make you think about your life, and put your problems in perspective. You need to see this.