I bet that if you’ve been using Gmail for a while you have some tricks up your sleeve, some method of filtering. Weather you just use labels or folder, or have an elaborate set of rules to sort automatically, I bet many of you don’t know this upcoming trick.

If you use Gmail you can actually modify the address you input into various fields. Let’s say I want to send all the comments of my blog to a separate folder. Now I could create a filter, but it may be hard to find a common feature to filter, especially if you manage multiple blogs. When you tell the blog front-end to send you email notifications you can use the following format

email+anytext@gmail.com

Emails sent to “johndoe+blogcomments@gmail.com” are still sent to the “johndoe@gmail.com ” inbox, but you have two important advantages now. One is that you can quick sort all your comments by using a simple filter.

The other one is more useful for registration purposes. Just sign up for any service, even spam-suspicious ones with “johndoe+registration@gmail.com” If you see any suspicious emails, just block all mails sent to that address.

This is not a fool proof method, it has its merits, but it also has some drawbacks, take a look at the discussion on lifehacker.com (in the comments). You will see that it is better for personal use than spam filtering, but the more tools we have the better! If you have any more commnets please feel free to add here.

Lifehacker discussion