lunes, enero 14, 2008

Labeling with Gmail

This is a rather old trick, many of you may know it, but today I came up with this at work, and showed it to some of my workmates. Interestingly enough, I learned this trick myself from my workmate Quique.

Using gmail, it is possible for the sender to send an already labeled email. For example, let's guess that I saw an interesting job offer and I though of my friend John who maybe interested. I want to forward this job offer to him, but I want also my email to skip his inbox and go straight to his job hunting folder. In gmail there are not folders, at least not as in other webmails. Emails are labeled, and with the help of filters we can organize incoming emails and archive them automatically.

So, if I want to send an email to John regarding a job position I will send him an email to the following address: john+jobs@gmail.com. Anything after '+' means a label. That means that if John has the label jobs created on his account, that email will skip the inbox and go straight to his jobs folder. In case label jobs did not exist on John account, the email would be delivered straight on his inbox. So, remember: email+label@gmail.com

There are many other uses of this address schema. Some people use it for keeping track of spam. For example, whenever you leave a post on a discussing board, you could add a significant label together with your email address, so if later you received any spam you could always know from where did the spammers get the address (and by then, knowing which boards are reliable and which ones are not).

Another interesting use it is to register many times on a service without bothering creating different fake email accounts xD.

Further reading:
  • http://blog.codefront.net/2004/06/26/sending-to-yournamelabelgmailcom-labels-your-email/

2 comentarios:

iurgir dijo...

gmail? What is that? Like hotmail or something like that ;-P

Unknown dijo...

At work we use a wiki called socialtext. They use the same technique to create wiki pages. You send an email to the wiki address and what's after the + is your tag. What's in the subject will become your wiki page title.
Neat trick, I like it.