Here's a fun trick you can do with email, though not all email providers support it... Gmail does support it, as does Hotmail/Outlook.
Let's say your email address is
[email protected].
If you send an email to
[email protected], it still goes to the
[email protected] inbox.
This is so you can do things like add filters. You could use
[email protected] and then filter it to a folder called Linux. You can do
[email protected] to filter those emails to the spam folder (or send them directly to the trash folder).
Not all sites allow this, but I've found many do when I've tried it. Also, if you use
[email protected], you'll know if they shared/sold your email address if others start sending emails to that address.
If you registered for this site with
[email protected], you'd see that we don't share your email with anybody.
But, it essentially can give you 'infinite' email addresses. (Not truly infinite, but more than you can ever realistically use as a mere human.) You're limited by the number of characters allowed in an email address. That number would be 64. (After the @ symbol, you can have 254 characters for the domain name.)
This ability has been around for a long time. It's sometimes called 'plus addressing' or 'subaddressing'. It has been supported since the early 80s, but not all providers allow it. The goal of it isn't really to give you a bunch of email addresses. It's meant to be able to filter the inbound emails into distinct folders.
Back then, things were less robust than they are today. So, an organization may have
[email protected]. They could then give out an address like
[email protected] or
[email protected], with each user having access to their own folder.
I just checked this a couple of weeks ago, and I know that Google and Outlook all support it. That was the only testing I did.
au.lifehacker.com
