GMail Easter Eggs: Dot Blindess & Email Aliases

Here are two unexplored features in GMail that will can make your Gmail inbox spam proof.

You can then comfortably share your gmail email address on websites, mailing lists and forums without ever worrying about spam or solving CAPTCHAs.

Gmail Easter Egg 1: GMail allows email aliases and unlike Yahoo mail which lets you create just one extra email alias, GMail lets you create infinite number of aliases.

An email sent to paris.hilton@gmail.com or paris.hilton+fans@gmail.com or paris.hilton+blog@gmail.com will all be redirected to one common email address and that is paris.hilton@gmail.com.

Gmail does not recognize characters after the PLUS symbol but the gmail search filter can distinguish between the different address and you can therefore redirect these email to separats gmail folders or apply different labels.

So all emails with the TO: address as paris.hilton+blog@gmail.com [coming from her blog readers] can be automatically redirected to a blog folder in gmail and she can safely trash them when her inbox is approaching the 2 GB limit.

Gmail Easter Egg 2: Gmail cannot recognize dots or periods in email addresses or the user names - that means an address like paris.hilton@gmail.com is the same as paris.hi.lton@gmail.com or paris...hilton@gmail.com.

This is actually a bug than a feature but you can again exploit it to have different kind of email address in your forum signatures.

Keep in mind that hyphens (-) and underscores (_) can't be used in a Gmail address. Also, gmail user names are case insensitive, so it doesn't matter if you enter upper case or lower case letters.