Gmail - Multiple Email Addresses, One Email Account

Why would you want to have multiple email addresses going to one inbox?   At school, this can be very useful if you want your students to sign up for a site, such as a blog or Evernote, which require a unique email.

Here is the idea.   Students log in with a variation of your email.  Gmail will not see the variation, but your email filter will.  So all the varied email addresses come to your account, yet you can use a filter to route them to a folder or otherwise handle them.

It works like this:  Google does not recognize the following as different:

• The dot (.)
• Anything after a plus (+) sign
• @googlemail.com

Example:

Suppose your email address is firstlast@gmail.com.  The following unique addresses will also go to firstlast@gmail.com:

first.last@gmail.com
fi.rst.la.st@gmail.com
firstlast+1@gmail.com
firstlast+123@gmail.com
firstlast+middle@gmail.com
firstlast+m2@gmail.com
firstlast@googlemail.com
first.last@googlemail.com
firstlast+4@googlemail.com

and so on....

Some other reasons this could be useful:

Track spam - When you sign up for something on-line, use one of these aliases.  Later, when you start receiving promotional emails and you don't know why, check the To: field.  If the email is addressed to the alias you used to register for something, then you know where it is coming from.

Organize your mailbox - Use alias to register for sites that you use and then set email filters to sort the mail as it comes in.  Google search will recognize the unique address, but the gmail will ignore the variation.