Every time you sign up for a new streaming service, buy something from an online store, or register for a free webinar, you are required to hand over your email address. Inevitably, these companies will sell your data to third-party marketers or bombard you with daily promotional spam. To protect your primary inbox without having to create and manage entirely separate burner email accounts, Google quietly built a brilliant feature into Gmail: the “Plus Sign” trick. This feature allows you to instantly generate an infinite number of temporary email aliases on the fly, all of which route directly to your main inbox but can be easily filtered or blocked.
How the Plus Sign Trick Works
Gmail’s mail servers are programmed to completely ignore the plus sign (+) and any text that follows it when routing an email. The mail is always delivered to the root address.
For example, if your standard email address is [email protected], you can use any of the following variations, and they will all land in your exact same inbox:
- john.smith+netflix@gmail.com
- john.smith+shopping@gmail.com
- john.smith+spam@gmail.com
- john.smith+gymmembership2024@gmail.com
You do not need to configure anything in your Google account settings to make this work. The aliases are active immediately and permanently.
Using Aliases for Organization and Security
The primary benefit of this trick is tracking exactly who is selling your data and organizing incoming mail automatically.
Suppose you are signing up for a newsletter at a sketchy fitness website called “MuscleMax”. Instead of giving them your real email, you type [email protected] into their registration form. If, three weeks later, you start receiving spam emails about cryptocurrency from unknown senders, you can check the “To:” field of those emails. If they were sent to your +musclemax alias, you know with absolute certainty that MuscleMax sold your data to scammers.
Creating Filters to Manage Alias Mail
Because the alias is preserved in the “To:” field of the email header, you can use Gmail’s powerful filtering engine to automatically sort or delete emails sent to specific variations.
- Open Gmail on your computer.
- Click the Show search options icon (the three horizontal sliders) inside the main search bar at the top of the screen.
- In the To field, type your specific alias (e.g.,
[email protected]). - Click the Create filter button at the bottom of the dropdown menu.
- You can now instruct Gmail what to do with any mail sent to this alias.
- Check Apply the label to automatically tag all online receipts.
- Check Skip the Inbox (Archive it) if you want newsletters to bypass your main view.
- Check Delete it if a specific alias has been compromised by spammers and you want to permanently block all mail sent to it.
- Click Create filter.
By using the plus trick every time you register for a service, you gain granular, absolute control over exactly who is allowed to reach your primary inbox.