Well done is better than well said.

Ever receive spam in your inbox? It’s so annoying, if only I knew who it was coming from! Luckily, Gmail has the best spam filter of any email service I’ve used, so it’s rare that I see any spam, but when there is one in my inbox it makes me wonder where they got my email from. With either of these email tips, you’ll be able to know where it came from.

Positive thinking: The first trick is that you can add a plus sign character (+) to your email address and more text after the +. For example, if your email is my.email@gmail.com and you’re registering at msn.com for a newsletter, you could provide the email my.email+msn@gmail.com. This labeling only works when you use the + after the local-part (my.email) and before the domain (@gmail.com). I prefer to use this Gmail trick when I sign up for an account at a website where I need to provide an email address. Signing up for an account with Spotify and have to provide an email address, I would use my.email+spotify@gmail.com. Using the +domain-name label helps me recognize which site the email has come from and if I receive spam and it has one of these + identifiers attached to it, I know exactly where that piece of spam came from.

The second of my Gmail tricks is to use a period (dot) (.) as a separator. This does not affect your email address, it is interpreted the same with or without the dots. my.email@gmail.com is the same as myemail@gmail.com or m.y.e.m.a.i.l@gmail.com. Why is this relevant? Not all websites allow the + character in email registrations, so the “.” can be helpful in still filtering websites when the + is not usable. Additionally, you would look as if you’re casting a co-worker aside if you’re informing them that your email is my.email+work@gmail.com because it’s not personal. So you can use the dot to help label your email provided to co-workers: myemail@gmail, rather than my.email@gmail.com or vice versa. Just try to stick to the same layout for each co-worker.

I have not tested these email tricks with other providers, such as Hotmail, but there is a strong possibility that they have similar capabilities. Also, mess around with the Lab settings in Gmail for some great bonus features.