One Gmail account, multiple e-mail addresses
One Ring to rule them all,
One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them.
- J. R. R. Tolkien -
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I’m a big fan of Google. I still remember when their search engine first came out and it changed the way I looked at the internet. I’ve followed their technology ever since. At the moment I’m a regular user of Gmail, Google Reader, Calendar, Documents, Translate, YouTube, …
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We all know the advantages of Gmail, like their 7,5GB (and still counting) of storage, numerous lab features, filters, labels, one account for all services, … What most people don’t know, though, is that when you sign up for one gmail address, you actually receive multiple e-mail addresses, all linked to that same inbox. How does that work, you might wonder?
- First of all, you get the e-mail address that you register on two different domains: gmail.com and googlemail.com.
If your e-mail address is, for example, helloworld@gmail.com, then Gmail will automatically create the e-mail address helloworld@googlemail.com for you. You can send e-mails to either address and receive them in the same inbox.The reason for this is more a practical than a generous one, though. Apparently, the domain gmail.com is unavailable in some countries. Those users can then use the domain googlemail.com
- Secondly, Google suffers from something called Dot Blindness.
This simply means that it doesn’t recognize any dots (periods) in the username of a gmail address.More concrete, in the eyes of Google, the above mentioned e-mail address helloworld@gmail.com and hello.world@gmail.com or hell.o.worl.d@gmail.com or even h.e.l.l.o.w.o.r.l.d@gmail.com are all the same and they are ALL yours! This, of course, also counts for the googlemail.com domain.
- Thirdly, you can use a plus sign, followed by any alphanumeric character at the end of your username. Google won’t recognize the characters after the plus (+) sign, but Gmail filters will.
For example, the e-mail addresses helloworld+world123@gmail.com, helloworld+world456@gmail.com and helloworld+me@gmail.com all end up in the same inbox as helloworld@gmail.com, as well as a mixture of all three, like hello.world+itisme@googlemail.com.
These three methods give you an endless range of e-mail addresses that you can use by only registering one gmail address!
Why use this? Well, simply because you can 
. Other reasons would be to separate personal and business use or use the filters in gmail to automatically perform an action on a specific e-mail address. You can also easily track where e-mails or spam messages are coming from by for example, signing up for a newsletter with a specific e-mail address and then when, all of a sudden, you start receiving spam from that address, you’ll know the source and you can even block it.
One single account to rule them all .
