I remember reading about a Gmail feature that lets you modify your email address with special characters to track where spam comes from. The idea is you can add some kind of marker to your regular Gmail address when signing up for different services. For example, if your email is [email protected], you could use something like myemail[marker]@gmail.com and it would still deliver to your main inbox. This way you can see which websites sold your email to spammers and set up filters accordingly. I think it uses a plus sign or some other symbol but I can’t recall the exact syntax. Has anyone used this Gmail feature before? What’s the correct way to format these modified addresses?
You’re thinking of the plus sign trick, not brackets. If your email is [email protected], just add +whatever to get [email protected] when signing up for stuff. I’ve used this for years - it’s perfect for catching companies that sell your data or get hacked. Gmail also ignores periods in usernames, so [email protected] and [email protected] hit the same inbox. But the plus sign is way more useful since you can make specific tags like [email protected] or [email protected]. Heads up though - some sites reject emails with plus signs because they think they’re fake, which is super annoying.
Works as advertised, but there are some gotchas. I’ve used [email protected] for three years - technically it’s solid, but tons of sites caught on. Their systems now strip everything after the + when checking for dupes, so you lose the tracking benefit. Plus, about 20% of forms just reject the + as invalid. The filtering part is amazing though - when Adobe or LinkedIn get hacked, I know instantly because spam hits those tagged addresses. Just don’t expect it to work everywhere since everyone’s adapted to this trick.
yeah, it’s the + symbol, but i don’t bother anymore. tried it for 6 months and most spammers just strip out the +whatever part before selling your address anyway. plus some banking sites won’t accept the + in their forms, which was frustrating when opening accounts.