If you have a Gmail account, you have unlimited addresses and you may not even know it. There are two ways to achieve this, adding a phrase (“plus-addressing”) and adding a period to your address.

This is not a Gmail specific trick, some other email clients can create unlimited addresses as well.

Plus-addressing

Let’s say that your Gmail address is buckleup@gmail.com and you want to automatically label all work emails. This can be done simply by adding a plus sign and a phrase to make it buckleup+work@gmail.com. Any email that is sent to buckleup+work@gmail.com will go to your buckleup@gmail.com account.

Add a period to your address

Let’s again say your Gmail address is buckleup@gmail.com. You can put a period in any spot before the “@” sign and the email will still be delivered to your account. For example buckle.up@gmail.com and b.uckleup@gmail.com will both work.

Practical uses

• Filter emails and automatically label incoming mail
• Find out who is spamming you
• Archiving mail
• Create multiple accounts on sites that don’t allow duplicate addresses