Simple Email Tweak = Better Email

I recently found a super awesome trick for e-mail. All you do is add a + to your email address with some term after it. Like this:

[email protected]

Now, this still sends the email to you. Actually, at first, it doesn’t do anything spectacular. However, when coupled with simple filtering in your email, you can have any email sent to that address (with the +whatever) always do specific things.

Now, let’s say that I have a lots of different accounts with various financial institutions. Each account will send me emails periodically. You know, monthly statements and the like. But when those emails get to my inbox, I want them to be automatically ‘labeled’ (in gmail) or sent to a specific folder (in most other email clients).

With the trick above, it’s surprisingly easy. All you need do is enter your email address for all financial institutions as [email protected] instead of your normal [email protected]. Then, from within your email client (I’ll give specific instructions for gmail, but other clients should be similar), go into ‘Settings’, then ‘Filters’, and ‘Create a New Filter’. Then, in your filter, simply enter [email protected], and tell it what to do with it.

It’s a surprisingly simple way to easily filter things out, and get things to organize themselves when they hit your inbox. This trick is especially useful if you have a variety of people emailing you about one specific topic (students, for example), and don’t want to bother organizing all your messages.

And that’s it! I hope you find it useful.