Using your Gmail email address more than once

If you have a Gmail address, you technically have only that address. With these tweaks, however, you can parlay it into dozens of variations that appear different to senders, all without actually making new Gmail accounts.

In a nutshell, this entails making your address look different with periods and plus signs. Any website that has your email on file will think that email1@gmail.com is different from email.1@gmail, and that both are different from email1+me@gmail.com.

This is possible because Google ignores periods and plus signs in its email addresses. It treats all incoming mail — regardless of a dot or plus sign — as the exact same account. As far as Gmail is concerned, the periods and plus signs are simply not there.

If this is confusing, consider this: When you signed up for Gmail and chose your email address, you could have used the tricks below and wound up with the same address you have. In fact, you can even log into Gmail using one of these tweaked addresses, and Google will take you to the same email account with the same emails, contacts, etc.

Add a Dot Anywhere

Gmail ignores periods in addresses, so put a dot anywhere in your email, and Gmail will pretend it doesn't exist. Any website you sign up for, though, will see your dotted email address as different than your non-dotted one; this means you can sign up for multiple accounts on the same website without needing multiple email accounts.

Below are some examples. Keep in mind that each address is the exact same, so you could send mail to all of these to reach the same Inbox.

• j.oesfamily@gmail.com
• jo.esfamily@gmail.com
• joe.sfamily@gmail.com
• joes.family@gmail.com
• joesf.amily@gmail.com

You can't add a period after the @ sign, but anything before it is open for tweaking. You can even add more than one period, like this:

• my.business.is.great@gmail.com
• mybusiness.is.great@gmail.com
• m.y.business.i.s.g.r.eat@gmail.com

Again, all three email address above are exactly the same, according to Google. However, you could make three Hanover accounts with those addresses because Hanover assumes each address is from a different person.

Add a Plus Sign

Another way to spawn different Gmail addresses with nothing but a syntax trick is to add a plus sign at the end of the username (before the @). Doing this lets you add other words to your address, so it actually can look quite different.

Here are a few examples that expand on the email address joeman@gmail.com:

• joeman+moretext@gmail.com
• joeman+thatsmyname@gmail.com
• joeman+ilovehunting@gmail.com