We recently sponsored the slightly-awkwardly-named-but-totally-worthwhile Type-A Parent Conference in Atlanta, and so naturally the topic of email came up (surprise!), especially in relation to testing email forms with different email accounts. It can be a real pain to create yet another email address for your site, and so we all have only a few addresses to go around. Right?
Wrong! If you have a gmail account – and who doesn’t? – you effectively have an infinite number of email addresses. And I was surprised how few of the experienced bloggers and content marketers I met on this trip knew this great gmail tip. Hence, this post…
The trick’s really simple. Say your gmail account is yourname@gmail.com. All you have to do is add a plus sign after “yourname” and then any regular email friendly text (no spaces, commas, etc) before the @ sign, and voila! As far as any third party site is concerned, you just created a new, unique, custom email address. It will still be routed to your regular gmail inbox, where you can then build filters to send these inbound emails to different folders if you want to.
For example, phollows+screenscraped@gmail.com is a perfectly valid email address that will reach my gmail inbox, but will by definition be spam (since it will only ever appear in this blog post) and so I can simply route it to junk.
Practically speaking, you can use <yourname>+<sitename>@gmail.com to uniquely track individual subscriptions, purchases, registrations from any web site. With this technique, you can see which sites are selling your email address, for example; or which perhaps have been compromised, because now you can use a unique email address for every site you interact or register with.
Want to test your email subscription form or popup? <yourname>+<test1>@gmail.com (etc.) will do the job nicely.
With gmail you effectively have an infinite reservoir of unique email addresses you can do almost anything with. It’s pretty neat. Meanwhile, if you’ve some good email tips, we’d love to hear them in the comments.
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