WiseCleaner Think Tank
Encounter difficult computer problems?
All about maintenance and optimization of your Windows System.
Jan 2, 2014
There are times when you end up signing up for a newsletter or buying something online and forgetting to uncheck the option for sending you product updates, deals, and so forth. Those are usually not spam in the traditional sense, but if it’s sent to you on a regular basis, it can be quite annoying.
Most companies that do this have the option to unsubscribe, but there are many that do not. In that case, there are a few Gmail hacks that you can use to help sort out spam email or email that you do not care to have in your Inbox!
If you didn’t already know, Gmail does not really look at dots in your account name when processing email. So for example, I could write out an email address as [email protected] instead of the [email protected]. Pretty neat eh?
You can add as many dots as you like and it won’t matter, you’ll still get the email. So what’s the point of this if the email is still coming to your Inbox?
Filters! You can give out an email address with dots in it and then setup a filter later on to have it automatically archived or deleted, if it ends up being very spammy.
If you’re part of many email groups, etc, you can use this to automatically filter out those emails from your Inbox, so it’s not cluttered up. It’s always safer to give out an email address that’s slightly different than your normal one in case spammers get hold of it later and start sending you crap loads of emails.
This Gmail hack has been around for a LONG time and most people already know about it. However, I don’t think that many people use it! Simply place a “+” after your account name and add words to uniquely identify that email address, so you can again create filters, etc.
For example, I can change my email address to [email protected] when signing up at Amazon.com. Now I can create a filter and have it automatically labeled whenever I buy something from there. Amazon is safe, but if you’re signing up for a free game download or free music download, etc, you might want to do something like this in case they give your email out to third parties.
The plus hack is useful, but it sometimes might not be allowed since it’s not a normal symbol in an email. In that case, use the Dot hack or the Googlemail hack I’m about to mention.
Finally, you can change the last part of your email account to googlemail.com instead of the normal gmail.com! It’s another nifty way to not give out your main email address and can seriously help clear your Inbox of spam or junk email.
So [email protected] is exactly the same as gmail.com. So if you want to keep your account name consistent, without all of the dots or pluses, then you can just use googlemail.com instead.
