of g(oogle)mail's dots, capital letters and plus aliases

I just found this out today about Gmail, and I think it's super cool. Heh.

From https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=10313# :

“Gmail doesn't recognize dots as characters within usernames, you can add or remove the dots from a Gmail address without changing the actual destination address; they'll all go to your inbox, and only yours. In short:

homerjsimpson@gmail.com = hom.er.j.sim.ps.on@gmail.com
homerjsimpson@gmail.com = HOMERJSIMPSON@gmail.com
homerjsimpson@gmail.com = Homer.J.Simpson@gmail.com

All these addresses belong to the same person. You can see this if you try to sign in with your username, but adding or removing a dot from it. You'll still go to your account.”

And as many people may already know, letters in small or large caps does not really matter.

Plus, both @gmail.com and @googlemail.com would go the same email account.

Additionally, from https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=12096 :

“Gmail doesn't offer traditional aliases, but you can receive messages sent to your.username+any.alias@gmail.com. For example, messages sent to jane.doe+notes@gmail.com are delivered to jane.doe@gmail.com.

You can set up filters to automatically direct these messages to Trash, apply a label or star, skip the inbox, or forward to another email account.”

For example, your email address is supermanbatman@gmail.com. You then sign up to an Asda account for online groceries, so you write down your email as supermanbatman+asda@gmail.com. When Asda sends an email to that address, you will still get it in your supermanbatman@gmail.com email account.

Now why would you want to do that you may ask. Well, just like in the Google help answer above, you can filter emails that are sent to supermanbatman+asda@gmail.com to automatically label them as ‘asda’ or just put them in the Spam or Bin folders.

Apparently, these features have already been in Gmail for several years now. Ain’t that kool yo?

Let me finish this post with examples of different email addresses that will re-direct emails to the same email account.

So, for the email address supermanbatman@gmail.com, all of these are actually the same:

superman.batman@gmail.com
SupermanBatman@gmail.com
supermanbatman@googlemail.com
supermanbatman+robin@gmail.com
SuperMan.BatMan+KryptonGotham@googlemail.com
Su.Pe.Rm.An.Ba.Tm.An@gmail.com
suP.Erm.aNb.At.maN+WonderWoman@gmail.com
SUPERMAN.batman@googlemail.com
Superman.Batman+FlashMartianGreenLantern@gmail.com

I guess that should be enough! Heh.

So what are you waiting for, move to Gmail if you haven’t already done so.