Sometimes, after you register to receive a new newsletter, you start to receive much more spam than usual. You, naturally, suspect the newsletter provider can be using your data fraudulently, selling or renting your address in an illegal way. How you can tell if this is the case?

To find out, you can use a couple of not very well known tricks that GMail, the terrific free Webmail from Google, offers to you.

If you append the name of the newsletter provider -or any other identifier that makes sense to you- to your GMail user, using a '+' sign, the effect is that you still will receive the emails sent to this new address in your normal GMail account, but you can unequivocally identify the origin of the email thanks to this appended identifier.

So, let's say that you own the myname@gmail.com address and want to subscribe to a newsletter called 'My Pet today' or something. You can subscribe using your normal address plus an identifier, for example:

myname+MyPetToday@gmail.com

After doing this you will receive all the email from this provider in your normal account, but with the new identifier appended. In this way you can filter the incoming email and classify it accordingly. What is much better: if you start to receive email in this "artificial" account which is not from "My Pet Today", you can know for sure that they are using your account for sending you not solicited email and delete it automatically. Great!

Other interesting GMail idiosyncrasy is that it does not support dots ('.') in addresses. When one or more are added to a GMail address they are stripped out before delivered. Due to this behavior, all these addresses are equivalent:

yourname@gmail.com, your.name@gmail.com, y.o.u.r.name@gmail.com

and the like :-)

You can use this "feature" to distinguish between senders that don't accept the '+' sign in your email address and therefore make the previous tip useless.

Remember too that GMail has another alternative domain, googlemail.com, that is exactly the same as gmail.com. So, you can use myname@googlemail.com as an alternative address to receive important e-mail from sources you trust, friends, and so on, keeping the classic one (@gmail.com) for other purposes.

If you use gmail's incoming filters wisely you can easily get your important mail classified, your not wanted e-mail deleted and discern who is fooling you selling or renting your email address.

Hope this helps

JM