A fellow Google Reader.. reader (lets call him Dre) pointed out an article recently about a guy who was re-signing up to all his online services (you know, the important stuff like MSN Live, Blizzard, Dominoes Pizza, Lord of the Rings MMO etc) and he was talking about his attempt to use the “+” notation to sign up using different email addresses that all transparently go back to his primary email address. Gmail has had this functionality for a while, in fact, Lifehacker wrote about “Instant disposable Gmail addresses” back in 2005. Where it failed though was that the “+” (plus sign) appeared to throw exceptions for a number of these services. In fact, it didn’t sound like he had any luck at all as most of the services seemed to have issues with the poor plus sign.
Another way to solve the problem is right there in front of you. Just shift your right ring finger down. That’s right. “.”. The full-stop.
Gmail allows you to insert as many of these wonderful characters where ever you like. So your email address is in fact name@gmail.com and n.ame@gmail.com and nam…………e@gmail.com, these are ALL valid. (Except if you use Google Apps for mail – sorry!!)
Now I know that this solution doesn’t really fit his requirement, but if you like to sign up to stuff and you’re unable to use the “+” sign, perhaps consider the handy “period” key. Keeping track of all the different dotted accounts is pretty simple. For example, you could email yourself to the dotted account with a comment saying “Hey me, I used this email address to sign up to Xbox live!”
Thanks Google!
