If you have your own internet domain, like “sciencetext.com”, then you can usually create as many email addresses as you like. But, managing them all can be a pain: setting up aliases, forwarders, spam filters etc.

However, with Google Mail you can also have as many email addresses as you like. If your main GMail address is ANOther@gmail.com, then you can also be A.N.Other@gmail.com, AN.Other@gmail.com and any combination of periods therein. Moreover, you can use GMail.com or GoogleMail.com they’re equivalent and all of those addresses will land in the inbox of your main address “ANOther@gmail.com” from where you can read them as webmail on the GMail site, POP3 download them to an email program or synchronize them using IMAP.

But…there is another way to get even more email addresses with Google Mail using the + sign.

You can have ANOther+something@gmail.com, ANOther+somethingelse@gmail.com, ANOther+yetanotherthing@gmail.com and all those addresses will send mail to your original, main address. The possibilities are endless, you could use them for a simple or sophisticated filtering system. Add a code to an email address for example ANOther+fromDave@gmail.com or ANOther+comments@gmail.com

You could use different variations as disposable email addresses for registering on any number of web forms, blog comments, etc etc. If there were a form to fill in here you might use the address ANOther+sciencetext@gmail.com so that you knew that any email to that address was associated with sciencetext.com and if you got any spam you could be fairly certain of its origin too!

There is one caveat, not all web forms will let you use the + sign. It’s time that the validation of web forms were updated to allow one to do so, although webmasters might deliberately be holding back on that to prevent just the kind of filtering I’m talking about. More likely, is that because + was not historically used in email addresses, inertia simply means they haven’t updated the form validation that precludes the use of this symbol.

By the way, email does not differentiate between capitals and lower case letters I’ve used “ANOther”, but that’s equivalent to “another”.