Hackszine.com: Gmail Spam Trap

Gmail Spam Trap

Gmail has an intersting feature that allows you to append a keyword to your email address with the plus (+) character. For example, username+spam@gmail.com will still deliver mail to username@gmail.com. This essentially allows you to create a unique email address whenever you need one.

This comes in really handy is if you are ever required to enter your email into a form online. If you use a unique keyword for every form that requires an email address, you'll be able to track down the culprit if you receive spam, just by looking at the To: header. You can then filter by that address to dump further incoming messages into the bin.

On the downside, this is just another arms race. It's not exactly rocket science removing the +keyword from gmail.com email addresses... On the plus side, it's useful for automatically categorizing and filtering the legitimate mail too. [via]

Related:

Google Hacks, 3E

Posted by Jason Striegel | Feb 27, 2007 01:33 AM
Gmail | Permalink | Comments (2)

Comments

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Posted by: jsalbre on March 2, 2007 at 5:16 AM

The username+whatever@domain.com trick has been around for a long time and is not just a Gmail thing; it will work with any standard mail server. I've been using it myself since at least 97 and I'm sure it was around before that as well.

Posted by: shadowlore on March 2, 2007 at 3:32 PM

Not necessarily. It really depends on the MTA. Some MTAs use the hyphen or dash as the local part separator.