Filtering Tricks for Gmail

If your Gmail inbox is getting a tad confusing, try organizing it using filters and variants of your email address. You can branch out your Gmail address to a variation of email addresses and hook them with filters when you receive emails. Say that your email address is starwarsfreak@gmail.com. Adding a plus sign (+) after your user nick and any letter-number combination will still result in you receiving an email. Try setting your Friendster account email to starwarsfreak+friendster@gmail.com. By doing this, all your Friendster notifications (if active) will go to starwarsfreak@gmail.com but the difference is now you can easily filter them based on the recipient address. In Gmail, go to Settings > Filters and type in your Friendster address in the To: field.

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Then, specify what action to do if an email matches the criteria. Apply a new label to it called “Friendster”. Voila. From now on, all emails from Friendster will be labeled accordingly. Another neat trick you can do is create a variant to handle potential spam, like starwarsfreak+spam@gmail.com. Use this email when registering for “iffy” sites that you’ll never want to be bothered by or never come back to. Simply setup a filter to delete messages going to this email.

Adding periods (.) anywhere in your username produces the same result. Gmail ignores these dots, so star.wars.freak@gmail.com and s.t.a.r.w.a.r.s.f.r.e.a.k@gmail.com and starwarsfreak@gmail.com are one and the same, of course except when applying filters, the dots do matter.

If you’re wondering if this works for Gmail for domains, yes it sure does.