Gmail and Sourcing your Spam

17 June 2005

Filed under: Geek Stuff, Personal, Computer Programming

Gmail has a neat feature of allowing you to enter aliases with your email address. This is a nice trick to help find the source of why you are now getting upteen thousand spam emails in your GMail account.

For exmaple, my email address is in the form of (this is a fake email, to keep spam bots from stealing my email address): eric@gmail.com

To make an alias, just add the plus (+) symbol to your username followed by whatever you want to type. Like: eric+forums@gmail.com

That's it. There is no setup to do, it works automatically. Try it. Send yourself an email to myaccount+EricRules@gmail.com. It will drop right into your Gmail inbox.

I do this a lot for contest or new websites that I have to signup on in order to read content. I've already caught a few sites that I got spam from.

What pisses me off is a lot of PHP websites do not support this "plus" symbol in the email address. Saying it's an invalid email address, or worse just parsing it out! Come on system admins, fix your shit!

(To the Admins) RFC2822, RFC2821, RFC1123, and RFC822 are what you can follow to ensure correct email address formats. Which, yes, includes the "+" symbol! Fix your sites, please.

Reader's Comments

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Eric A. Duncan said:

16 March 11 9:12 AM

In the 6 years since I made this blog post, this "plus" symbol has become invaluable to me. I've caught hundreds of sites "sharing" my email address to others.

I have a Google Applications account for my personal domains (including this domain) and the Gmail Aliases works there too! Brilliant!

Now I wil admit, the days of "selling" my email to another company seem to be over. It's more of a company was bought out or merged with a partner, so they gain access to the user base to send emails. So, the emails seem a bit more valid now.

The companies I have worked for over the years all had Microsoft Exchange, or they migrated to Microsoft Exchange from Google Apps. I'm sad to say that because of the lack of Aliases with Exchange, I don't like to use Exchange any longer.

It becomes a burden on me to only have 1 email. Lately, I've had to do a lot of QA testing with registration during development over the years. Who wants to create an account, go in and delete/rollback entire databases just to use the same email again and again? No one!

So, QA teams can really use this feature to its max by signing up with an unlimited amount of accounts, by only using 1 email address + the alias.

Gmail and Sourcing your Spam

Eric Duncan