Just found this extremely old (2005) post with a extremely great GMAIL feature. Its something I’ve been doing the hard way for a year now.

For the sake of this example, let’s say you need to sign up for a mailing list that interests you, but you’re afraid spammers might get your address. We’ll call the list “exoticflowers”. Sign up with the list using the address “johndoe+exoticflowers@gmail.com”. Email to that address will still come to your “johndoe@gmail.com” address even though the “To:” will include that “+exoticflowers” in it. Don’t add ANY spaces: those are not allowed in email addresses.

Okay, here’s where it gets useful!

Click on “Settings” at the top of the page and then click on “Filters”. Choose “Create a new filter”. The ONLY piece you need to fill out in the little form that appears is the “To:” line. Type in “johndoe+exoticflowers@gmail.com” and click “Next Step”.

On this screen, click on the little drop-down menu next to “Apply the Label” and choose “New Label”. Type in “Exotic Flowers” and hit “okay”.

So what have we done? We have created a filter so that every message to “johndoe+exoticflowers@gmail.com” will be labeled with “Exotic Flowers”. Instead of showing up in your main mailbox, these will now automatically appear under the label “Exotic Flowers”. You’ll see a list of labels on you Inbox screen along with how many new messages have come in with that label. Just click on the label name to see the messages.

This does several great things for you. First, if you get lots of mail you can now sort it into categories that are useful to you. Second, if you have trouble getting off a mailing list you can simply filter that address straight to your Trash so that you never have to deal with it. Finally, if you start getting spammed you’ll know which company or list let the spammers get you address: those spams will contain the modified address, so they’ll end up in the same folder as the company or list that let the spammers (or “affiliated company”) get your address.

Ive been using Google Apps For Your Domain to do this for a while but this is just awesomely easy. Anyone have any others?

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