This Gmail Trick Will Help You Manage Subscriptions And Spam Messages
Rather than go through the trouble of zeroing out your inbox on a daily basis, Gmail actually has a fairly unknown switch that gives you better control over unwanted messages as well as those that you expect to receive regularly and want to file away in your chosen manner. Combined with Gmail’s other useful features, this change can offer you not just better inbox organization but a potential way of discovering the sources of yourmost persistent spam messages.
After signing up for an account somewhere online using an altered Gmail address, you can use that alias to create a Gmail filter. To do this:
Once you’ve completed these steps, Gmail will automatically do what you programmed the associated filter to do the next time you receive emails sent to a particular alias.
The hidden benefits of using Gmail aliases
You don’t really have to get super specific with the categories you use to create Gmail aliases if you don’t want to. For instance, you can tell your colleagues to email you at “username+job@gmail.com” but also use it to join job-hunting pages and other work-related online platforms and services. Another good one would be to use “username+onlineshopping@gmail.com” to create accounts on various shopping websites. Categories that you append after your Gmail username can be absolutely anything you want them to be. Here are a couple of examples to get you started:
While the most apparent use of thisGmailhack of sorts is to make your inbox filtering more accurate, using a Gmail alias (especially a pretty specific one) can also offer you a method for ensuring the privacy of your personal data. The next time you get a weird message, check which email address is in the “to” field. If it’s one of the Gmail aliases you’ve created and assigned before, depending on how specific it is, you can get a firmer sense of which website or company could potentially be selling your contact information to third parties.
There’s no limit to the number of Gmail aliases you can create, so use several to filter as many email categories as you want. Provided that the website you have an online account to allows you to modify the email address associated with your profile, you can try switching it to a unique Gmail alias.
