De-Clutter Your Gmail Inbox With This Trick

If you have signed up for online accounts, newsletters, or even just to download a white paper that you want to read, you will know that a valid email address is usually required. As you are filling in the online sign-up form, a little voice inside your head may be telling you that you will be getting a whole new pile of daily notifications and junk mail cluttering up your inbox. Is there a way to deal with this? You bet.

If you have a Gmail account, Google allows you to create an infinite number of variations with your Gmail address that is still linked to your original address. You can add anything preceded by a + sign between your name and the @ sign and Gmail will consider this the same address. For example, if your Gmail address is johnwhite@gmail.com, you can use:

How can you take advantage of this? You can sign up for an account at Pinterest, for example, using johnwhite+pinterest@gmail.com and set up filtering rules within your Gmail account to route all emails to this address to a low-priority mailbox and mark them as read, or even to the trash folder or spam mail folder. Then your inbox will not be cluttered with notification emails.

The other variation of your Gmail address is to add periods to the address. For example:

haveaquestion@gmail.com is the same as have.a.question@gmail.com

If nothing else, it certainly makes your email address easier to read.

If you have another email address, send a test email to your Gmail account using these variations to see how it works!

[This tip originally appeared on the Law Society of Saskatchewan Library’s Legal Sourcery Blog]

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