Be a Master of Deceitfulness with Gmail

Not everybody likes to have his or her inbox stuffed with all sorts of emails and newsletters from companies that have absolutely nothing interesting to read, but they had to agree to receiving because of the ‘I Agree’ button once used in times of need. Gmail is dishing out options to avoid situations like this left and right, and it couldn’t do it at a better time.

Going through all of the difficulties of creating a filter for every sender to be blocked out is nothing somebody would want to do with his spare time. ‘Difficulties’ is not the appropriate word, but it sounds a lot better than ‘boring, time consuming, unnerving’ and so on, that is usually associated with setting up individual filters.

That’s why Gmail has just presented two of its features that can be used to become a master of deceitfulness to the companies with the newsletters or to those you don’t really want to be in contact with more times than once. Adding dots in your address when you give it should help out a lot. "Gmail doesn’t recognize periods as characters in addresses – we just ignore them," Robby Stein, Associate Product Marketing General writes on the official Gmail blog. If your address is something like iliketosingintheshower@gmail.com, you could give it to people as i.like.to.sing.in.the.shower@gmail.com, and it wouldn’t make a difference. It really helps when you want to stop receiving stuff from those who know the latter, because you can add a filter just for it, and set it to directly archive, delete and whatnot.

On the other end, adding a plus sign ("+") and any combination of words and numbers after the email address that it would recognize, would save some time and trouble with choosing from the contacts who you’d like to send the messages to. iliketosingintheshower+mailinglists@gmail.com pretty much says what it does without any further explaining.

Lenin was often quoted as telling his minions to "Study, study, study!" I Guess Google took it and transformed it into "Optimize, optimize, optimize!," because that’s what they’re doing, and doing it well.