How to instantly create a unique Gmail alias without registering

You often need to use your email address to register for services and products online. Using your main email address can quickly deluge you with spam email but using a different account is also a pain, as you have to access that account to pick up any mail related to that service. There’s also times you want to register for a service again, say to get a free trial period, but need to use another email address to do so.

Well, if you’re using Gmail, there’s actually a handful of different ways you can get round these issues without having to run additional email accounts. The tips aren’t anything new, but if you haven’t seen them before they can be quite the revelation.

Using johnexpert30(at)gmail.com (we’ve used ‘(at)’ in place of ‘@’ to avoid spam) as an example, you can then also use johnexpert30(at)googlemail.com as an instant, unique email address that should be accepted as a ‘new’ email by many services. The emails will still be delivered to your Gmail account’s inbox as normal, with all the ups and downs that entails.

But that’s not all, you can also use full stop (or period) marks in your email. So emails sent to j.ohnexpert30(at)gmail.com will still get delivered to the inbox for johnexpert30(at)gmail.com. Similarly, j.o.hnexpert30(at)gmail.com will also work. You can use any combination of full stop/period marks to create separate, unique email addresses. So j.ohnex.pert3.0(at)gmail.com will work just as well. If your email address already has full stops in it, such as firstname.lastname(at)gmail.com, omitting the full stops will also work.

You can also use ‘+’ marks to create unique email addresses, too. So you could use johnexpert30+ebay(at)gmail.com if you wanted to create a unique address for registering for eBay, or johnexpert30+competitions(at)gmail.com if you want to enter competitions and avoid spam. Using such a descriptive email address is particularly useful as the address you create will be used for the ‘to:’ field so you can create Gmail filters to move the emails automatically into folders or apply labels.

Not only that, if you’re worried that a company is passing your details on to third parties against your will to spam you, this is a quick way to test your theory. If you suddenly get emails from different companies to the unique address you created for registering, you’ll know they’ve misbehaved and passed your details on or sold it to a database.

So by using the above methods, you can create unique email addresses on the fly, with all of the emails delivered to your standard inbox in a quick, easily manageable way.