Gmail

Am I receiving someone else's email?

Because Gmail doesn't recognize dots as characters within usernames, adding or removing dots from a Gmail address won’t change the actual destination address. Messages sent to yourusername@gmail.com and y.o.u.r.u.s.e.r.n.a.m.e@gmail.com are all delivered to your Inbox, and only yours.

Gmail allows only one registration for any given username. Once you sign up for a particular username, any dot variations are made permanently unavailable for new accounts. If you believe that a message was sent to you accidentally, we suggest contacting the sender to inform him or her of an incorrect address.

If you created your account with a dot in your username but want to change it, you can edit your 'Reply-to address.' To edit your reply-to address:

Click Settings at the top of any Gmail page.
Open the Accounts tab.
Find the email address marked default and click edit info.
Click Specify a different "reply-to" address.
Enter your username without dots in the 'Reply-to address' field.
Click Save Changes.
For security reasons, when you log in to Gmail, you must enter any dots that were originally defined as part of your username.

Note: Google Apps recognizes dots.
If you'd like to receive mail with a dot in your username, please ask your domain administrator to add the desired username as a nickname in your user account.

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Gmail has an interesting quirk where you can add a plus sign (+) after your Gmail address, and it'll still get to your inbox. It's called plus-addressing, and it essentially gives you an unlimited number of e-mail addresses to play with. Here's how it works: say your address is pinkyrocks@gmail.com, and you want to automatically label all work e-mails. Add a plus sign and a phrase to make it pinkyrocks+work@gmail.com and set up a filter to label it work
(to access your filters go to Settings->Filters and create a filter for messages addressed to pinkyrocks+work@gmail.com. Then add the label work).

More real world examples:
Find out who is spamming you: Be sure to use plus-addressing for every form you fill out online and give each site a different plus address.

Example: You could use
pinkyrocks+nytimes@gmail.com for nytimes.com
pinkyrocks+freestuff@gmail.com for freestuff.com

Then you can tell which site has given your e-mail address to spammers, and automatically send them to the trash.

Automatically label your incoming mail: I've talked about that above.

Archive your mail: If you receive periodic updates about your bank account balance or are subscribed to a lot of mailing lists that you don't check often, then you can send that sort of mail to the archives and bypass your Inbox.

Example: For the mailing list, you could give pinkyrocks+mailinglist1@gmail.com as your address, and assign a filter that will archive mail to that address automatically. Then you can just check in once in a while on the archive if you want to catch up.

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