Give Out Unique Gmail Addresses for Easy E-mail Filtering without Creating New Accounts

How many times have you wished you had extra e-mail accounts, so you could give out unique addresses to business and personal contacts, or wanted to easily filter mail coming in about specific projects?

It's actually easy to do, and it doesn't require you to spend any money or go to the trouble of generating new Gmail accounts. In fact, it's so simple you'll be amazed.

Gmail ignores the presence of certain characters in your e-mail address. That's why, for example, if your name is Steve Smith and some other Steve Smith grabbed SteveSmith@gmail.com ahead of you, no arrangement of periods (like Steve.Smith@gmail.com) will ever work for you -- Steve #1 now has a monopoly on this account name.

The upside: You can insert periods anywhere you like in your e-mail address, give out the variations, and all those addresses will come back to you just fine. And you can filter incoming mail so Steve.Smith@gmail.com goes to one folder, while SteveSmith@gmail.com goes to another.

Another trick: You can add a plus sign to the end of your e-mail address and tack on any text you like; it'll get passed to your account normally, and you can again filter the results to taste.

That means you can give out addresses like SteveSmith+work@gmail.com, SteveSmith+home@gmail.com, and SteveSmith+urgent@gmail.com. [via Lifehacker]