Master Your Gmail Inbox: Part 3 – Using Unique Addresses To Eradicate Spam

As I’ve said in this column, I get almost no spam.  And as great as Gmail is at filtering out the obvious spam, there what I call “second tier” spam, which is all the junk that you get after you sign up for a user account at a website or a merchant.  A lot of merchants will now ask you for an email address when you’re at the checkout, or they try to get you to sign up for a “membership” to their store.  Once they have your email address, you’re in the system and you’ll be getting email from them until the end of time.

So you went into that beauty supply store and bought a 40 ounce bottle of shampoo and now your hair will have all the extra body it deserves.  But in a moment of weakness you gave the cute girl with the push-up bra your email address.  Now you three emails a week from them.  The coupons are okay, because in 18 months when you run out of shampoo that 20% off coupon is going to come in handy.  In the meantime, you’ve got a lot of unneeded email cluttering up your inbox.

Even worse than the email you get from stores are the ones you get if you sign up for a politician’s newsletter.  Yes, Ron Paul, I’m talking about you again, you son-of-a-gun.

Become Master of Your Domain

Here’s something you might not know.  You can get your own email address.  I don’t mean your own gmail account, I mean email at your own domain, as in [email protected].  It’s about $15 a year for a .com, assuming you can find one you like that isn’t taken.

Why would you do this?  First, because having your own domain name is cool.  Second, because then you can give everybody a unique email address and I’ll explain why this is useful in a moment.

Registering a domain name is pretty simple using a service such as NameCheap or GoDaddy.  I’ve used GoDaddy for years, and I can say with certainty that they have really good customer service and are always happy to help with things like this.

Let’s say your name is Jane Smith and you want to register the domain JaneSmithRules.com so you can have the email address [email protected].  Go to GoDaddy and search for the domain you want to register.  For our example you don’t need hosting because you’re not going to be setting up a website, but simply using the domain to receive email.  Every registrar is a little different, but the reputable ones (Such as NameCheap or GoDaddy) will be able help you set up your email forwarding.

You want to set up a simple “catch-all” that will take any email that ends with @janesmithrules.com and forward it to your gmail account.

Everybody Gets Their Own Email Address

Now that you own your own domain, and have set up email forwarding, you can give everyone you meet a unique email address.  What I mean by this is that when you sign up for that account at Starbucks, you can use the email address [email protected], and when your son’s school wants your email address you tell them it’s [email protected].

Both of those email addresses will be forwarded to your gmail account automatically.  You can make up new email addresses as needed.  Even random characters will work. [email protected] will get to you, although you probably wouldn’t want to use that one.

Become A Spam-Killing Ninja

So, why would you want Starbucks to have a different email address for you than your dentist?  Because you can use that information to more effectively filter your incoming email.

You want to create an account on the latest social network.  We’ll call it “rankfriend.com”, where you can tell everyone how much you love or hate your friends.  But you don’t want to give them your “real” email address do you?  As it turns out, when you created that Rank Friend account, they sold their email list to 50 people and suddenly you’re getting a ton of email that you don’t want.  If they had your primary email address, you would be facing a never-ending stream of spam and you’d really have no way of knowing how all these people got your email address.  Thanks for nothing, Rank Friend!

If you’d given Rank Friend the email address [email protected], you would be able to identify that this sudden influx of junk mail is being sent to [email protected].  Now you know that Rank Friend is sharing your email address, and you can create a Gmail filter that will automatically take any email sent to [email protected], bypass your inbox and send it right to the trash.

But Wait, There’s More!

The example I gave above is by far the most useful reason to give unique email addresses, but there are other ways to use unique email addresses with filters.

• Create a filter to identify email sent from your child’s school and forward a copy to your spouse.  It won’t matter who, or what email address it was sent from.
• Create a filter to mark appointment reminders from your doctor’s office as important.
• Create a filter to check all the email you get from Nordstrom and archive (bypassing the inbox) anything that doesn’t contain the word “coupon”.
• Create a filter that automatically deletes email from your friend Susan if it has “FWD” in the subject line.  Because Susan has a problem with forwarding cat pictures.

There are probably a hundred more ways you can make use of unique incoming email addresses.

In Conclusion

Being able to give every person, business, and website a unique email address is useful.  Not only does it give you a powerful tool in the fight against unwanted email, it generally lets you use gmail filters to more effectively handle your email.  By using Gmail filters along with unique email addresses you’ll find that your inbox can be uncluttered and you can become more productive.

If you have any strategies that you use for fighting spam – tools or techniques – I’d love to hear about them in the comments.