Snippet: Find out who gave away your Gmail address

March 1, 2007 by guestauthor in Geeky,Snippet with 9 Comments

There’s a very simple and cool trick in Gmail to find out if any websites gave your email address away. In this example your Gmail addy is flowergirl1172@gmail.com (I have no idea why I chose that).

When filling in a registration form www.whateversite.com enter your email address as flowergirl1172+whateversite@gmail.com. When Gmail sees a “+” in an email address, it uses all the characters to the left of the plus sign to know who to send it to. In this example it would still send it to flowergirl1172@gmail.com.

The additional bonus is that when you search flowergirl1172+whateversite@gmail.com in Gmail, you will see all emails that were sent to that address. Then simply click on the ‘details’ link to see who sent you message.

Sweet!

http://connerdowney.com Conner

Is there a way to do this without registering for sites? I suddenly have been getting spam, and I never used to, so I am wondering if there is a database or something where those bots look at and send emails too.
chad

awesome tip!
http://www.uneasysilence.com Dan

Check out bugmenot.com
G H I S C O T T

It is only a matter of time before they learn to scrub off the part of the address after the “+” and send to the remaining address. It is a clever idea in any case.
Jim

I haven’t check yet, but is there a way to block emails coming from a certain +whateversite? That way if they sell/lose your info you can automatically block all of those emails…
Mike D

I use sneakemail.com I like it better than this because they get any part of your real e-mail address
http://thej2.com j2

Something else: You can make as many emails as you want simply by putting periods in your username. My Gmail account is j2n4me@gmail.com, so j.2n4me, j2.n4me, j.2.n.4.m.e, and all other similar things would redirect to j2n4me@gmail.com
http://www.ericnakagawa.com Eric N.

Uneasysilence, this is the second great tip this week! Great job!!!
http://www.seriouslyexcited.net dalton

@Jim: just create a filter to automatically send them to the trash.

This is a good tip, I’ve been using it for quite a while now, but I’ve come across a couple of problems. One is that many email forms do not accept the plus sign as a valid character, so you’re forced to give them a real address. Two is that sites are learning to strip anything to the right of the plus sign, so I do get spam and some sites I registered with an email like this send me mail without the plus sign. So it’s useful, but not perfect. I guess nothing ever will be.

Snippet: Find out who gave away your Gmail address

Related Posts:

Recent Comments