I recently learned about this a few months ago and finally got around to writing about it. If I didn’t know about it, I’m taking a chance that some of you don’t know either!
If you are with Gmail, your email address has multiple variations already built into one!
Let me explain the back story:
I found this out by accident because I had tried to register my personal name without any dots in it, thinking I needed something simple to give to people.
When I went to go register it, my heart sank when it told me it was already taken.
Then I recalled a long time ago when Gmail first debuted, I was on the first wave of people who had Gmail addresses, and I had instantly registered my full name without any dots.
Heartened, I tried to sign in with that, and clicked on “Forgot password” (it was so long ago, I couldn’t remember what password I may have used!).
To my surprise, my own CURRENT password hint popped up for my regular email address with dots, and it immediately dawned on me that I owned them all.
YAY FOR GMAIL DOTS!
Basically, if you have a name like: mochiandmacarons, you can do anything you want to it.
You can add dots to change up your email address to look like something different!
You can enter:
mochi.and.macarons
OR
mochiand..macarons
…and it will all go into the same mailbox.
Just don’t try to add numbers or letters, it will be a different email address altogether.
Here are your options to play around with in your email address:
That’s good to know, but what the heck can I do with this?
An excellent way to use this is to give one style of your email address to be used for all career or job related things, another variation for family, another for friends, etc.
Then when you receive the emails, you can filter incoming emails by the way they have typed your email address, and you can have automatic labels like “CAREER” slapped on emails that have a dot at the front of the email address, or at the end.
Either way, you should at least know what you own as an email address and not freak out that someone else named “mochi and macarons” is receiving your emails by accident just because you put a “.” in the middle of the name and they didn’t.
Enjoy!
