Best Productivity Hack for Gmail users that make life easier

If you want to keep track how your email is used by companies or if they are selling your addresses, here’s a little hack to do so.

This only works with Gmail IDs and I’m not sure if Yahoo or Live are able to do this.

Let’s get started saving your time

Next time (ie, when you sign up to a newsletter), add “.” or “+” (without quotes) in your username. This way you’ll create a new ‘alias’‘ email address and all the messages sent to that new ‘alias‘ address will get forwarded to your primary Gmail address.

Example 1:

take this for instance  “username@gmail.com”
So, for example, if your Gmail address is username@gmail.com then you can make variations like:

“u.se.rna.me@gmail.com” or “username+hello@gmail.com” (remember, you just change the username, not @Gmail)

Add one or more periods as you like (“.”) or (“+”) within your address. These periods will be ignored by Gmail. As an example, “s.o.m.e.u.s.e.r.n.a.m.e@gmail.com” and “someuser+me@gmail.com” is recognized by Gmail as your normal “someusername@gmail.com” address.

Now you can track how the company, you’ve signed up with, is using your email address.

Example 2:

Like you have signed up on website.com with address like “username+web@gmail.com” and you get a email from some other company with above address, Its time to stop using website.com your address is being sold by that website.

Remember:

You can use “.” (periods) in between or end of the address before the @gmail.com, but “+” can only be used after your gmail username

Bonus:

1) So, when signing up for email updates, newsletters or anywhere you enter your Gmail address, simply add “+anyword” after your username.

For Netflix: username+netflix@gmail.com

And for the Forbes : username+forbes@gmail.com

2) You can also save time by creating unlimited number of email IDs like these and not creating a different id for every work

Keep going

username+googleplus@gmail.com

username+facebook@gmail.com

username+twitter@gmail.com

username+pinterest@gmail.com

And on and on and on…

You can build a page on Facebook with above hack or can even create a new account with any website with above Productivity Hack

Recommended Read – 5 common mistakes Web Designers should avoid

P.S. Learned from someone