All of us battle span each day, from our work emails, Gmail right down to the new Facebook Spam. If there was a service I were to recommend as the best spam free service the I would definitely recommend Gmail. The revolutionary service for web mail. I use the word revolutionary strongly since Gmail has provided so many different services and features that have just made emails so much better. And that too in a time when there were so many services providing limited features / space and options. So, well Gmail came into our lives, and I have never looked at anything else for email.

In the software industry as a pun Software engineers began hiding small features and programs that would provide some sense of satisfaction when the user found them, they called these Easter Eggs. So the features and tips today are all based around these 3 awesome easter eggs.

Easter Egg 1 : The Second Email Address

The first easter egg is a great service from Gmail, that provides 2 email addresses for every account. One being a regular @gmail.com address which we are all used to. The second one is a @googlemail.com, email address. Yes test it yourself, send a test email to your googlemail account and check.

Example : The gmail Id which is Britney.spears@gmail.com also has a Britney.spears@googlemail.com Id which reaches the same destination.

Why is this helpful ?

You can use the GoogleMail ID to give it to your friends and family and also use this address in most of your important communication areas, like special blogs you follow .. ahem … You can use the Gmail Id for all other locations on the Internet.

Once you have done this, you can create a folder (Label)  in Gmail where your Googlemail.com emails will be directed into. In this way you can be assured that all your important email reaches you on time and you dont have to loose out any of those emails into spam.

Easter Egg 2 : Multiple Email Addresses – the Dot Trick

The second easter egg is a feature wherein your email address can be also named with the unlimited dots in them. What does this mean ? 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.

Gmail cannot recognize dots or periods in email addresses or the user names – that means an address like britney.spears@gmail.com is the same as b.r.i.t.n.e.y.s.p.e.a.r.s@gmail.com or britney…spears@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 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.

Why is this helpful ?

Creat different email addresses to give different people, and if you start receiving spam from a particular site, you can then block that particular email address. Interesting ?

Easter Egg 3 : The + effect

The last easter egg is a bit more elaborate. While we say above that the number of dots in an email address makes no difference to Gmail, what is also interesting to know is that you can add in characters into your email address that will also make no difference to your email address. For example, you can use britney.spears+website@gmail.com or britney.spears+blog@gmail.com and the emails will come over to the britney.spears@gmail.com account.

Why is this helpful ?

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 britney.spears+blog@gmail.com [coming from her blog readers] can be automatically redirected to a blog folder in gmail and she can safely trash them.

However

The tip of the “+” in the address might be useless, because many websites don’t allow you to put the character “+” in a form for the registration and stuff.