I just got back from lunch at Chantanee with Rob Stevens, who I met at the PAX ’06 new media panel. We ate delicious Thai food and spoke of many things. In the course of our meal he revealed THIS AMAZING FACT ABOUT GMAIL.
Gmail doesn’t recognize dots (.) as characters within a username. This way, you can add and remove dots to your username for desired address variations.
To this I can only respond, “Hot damn.” Separating my first and last names with a dot wasn’t exactly a horrible idea, but over time I’ve found that it makes it that much harder to communicate it to people verbally. Now I find that I can just leave it out; but if I wish to use the dot – or other characters – in my address to hack Gmail a little, I can. Neat.
Tags: Gmail, Gmail hacks
Wade Rockett 
If you think that’s great, check this out … you can do the same thing with a + sign.
You can use this to submit your e-mails address to various places, and then track where your spam is coming from.
For instance, say I were to sign up at Flickr. I could use superrob dot flicker at gmail dot com … and then set up a label or filter for anything coming to that address. If you start getting spam, you know precisely where it originated from.
It’s also handy for giving people a “one-time-use” email address, which you then intend to permanently filter after the fact. There’s a ton of potential uses!
I tried that trick at one site, using waderockett+[whatever the site name was] at gmail dot com. The site nixed it, saying that this wasn’t a valid e-mail address format. Next time, I’ll try it using the dot rather than the +.
Yeah, some sites don’t like the plus sign, but it’s nice to have the option. For example, it may be that you give out only the addresses with a plus in them to actual human beings, which again allows you to quickly discern between The Resistance and the Cylon menace.
Whoops, wrong comments thread, I think. :P