AfterTheDotNet

Fight spam with googlemail.com

Though Gmail usually does a good job as far as spam is concerned some mail does get through which is spam. Sometimes the opposite happens. The mail that is meant for me lands up in the spam folder in my Gmail account.

I was looking for options which could help me fight spam and also ensured that the mail that was meant for me was delivered to me when I saw an email from someone on the blog which had hidden@googlemail.com. What interested me was the googlemail.com domain. I thought maybe Google had a special domain for paid or premium customers.

Anyhow I searched on the Internet for googlemail.com and one of the results was a post on lifehacker. It turns out that when you sign up for gmail you get two email addresses. Example if Barack Obama was to sign up for a gmail account using the username “barack.obama”, he would have two email addresses barack.obama@gmail.com and barack.obama@googlemail.com.

This feature is there by default. You can exploit this to avoid spam. You can use your gmail email address for giving out on the internet wherever needed and give the googlemail address to close friends, family and colleagues whose mail you do not want to miss.

Once you have done that you can use filters (in the settings section which can be accessed from the main page using the links on top right) to deliver all email sent to your googlemail id to the inbox (or another folder) thereby eliminating the possibility of missing the mail.

There are two hacks which I came across on the digital inspiration website which are useful to fight spam. The two tricks are a result of how Gmail works.

• By using a plus sign ‘+’ in your email addresses (example barack.obama+voters@gmail and barack,obama+nonvoters@gmail.com) would make Gmail deliver the mail to the same inbox but you can file these emails into different folders using the rules in Gmail. This is possible because the Gmail system does not read beyond the + sign when delivering the mail to inboxes
• Another hack that can be used is because of the fact that Gmail does not read the dot ‘.’ in the email addresses but this trick can be used to filter mail as well in Gmail. For more details please go here.

Gmail is my favorite email services and with these hacks I’m loving it more!