A couple of weeks ago, one of our CyerNotes articles discussed how to use the filters in Gmail. One of the tips we gave talked about using “plus addressing” in which sending an email to username+blah@gmail.com is the same as sending an email to username@gmail.com. The benefit to this is that when you’re signing up for different services, you can use a + address (a combo of words or numbers after your email address) and easily filter those emails. The example Ryan gave was this:
You could use an address username+amazon@gmail.com for all of your Amazon purchases. Then in the “To” field use the username+amazon@gmail.com to filter the emails sent from them
The only problem with this method is that some sites do not support using a plus sign in an email field (Facebook is one example). Luckily, there’s yet another way that you can filter email addresses and that’s by using one or several dots. These dots can appear anywhere in the email address so for example, you could do the following and it would still work:
- user.name@gmail.com
- usernam.e@gmail.com
- u.sername@gmail.com
You get the idea, don’t you? Once you apply filters to any of these variations, you can have them automatically be labeled, starred, and/or archived which can make your life that much simpler. The Gmail Blog wrote about this earlier today, so we know for sure that these are confirmed methods for addressing in Gmail.
Note: If you need a refresher on how to set-up filters in Gmail, we recommend reading this article.
I believe you can also use u.s.e.r.name@gmail.com or u….sername@gmail.com
(had to find out the hard way when poll submitters tried to commit fraud on a site I was working on 
)
I am wondering if this is valid the other way around, that is, is a gmail address which originally includes a dot (name1.name2 AT gmail.com) recognized under the form name1name2 AT gmail.com (without the dot), or n.ame1name2 and so on.
Of course I could test, my point is rather theoretical.
I have tested it just before, it seems like that it is invalid if a gmail address which originally includes a dot.
Opps, sorry, I make a mistake.
It indeed works for me.
Just as an FYI, I subscribed to a newsletter with a username+something@gmail.com address, and when I later tried to unsubscribe, it couldn’t find me. The listserv software was apparently converting the “+” to a space in my unsubscribe message. I finally had to set up a filter to automatically delete those messages.
Try username%2Bsomething@gmail.com when you try to unsubscribe. (%2B is the URI encoded version of + )
I never thought about that, but that could pose a lot of problems!