Came across this today when someone wanted to know how to create multiple email test accounts without involving their IT department (don’t ask!) or managing multiple free email accounts.
Gmail allows you to create aliases for your email address automatically.
For example, if your Gmail account is joe.bloggs@gmail.com then joe.bloggs+test.case01@gmail.com will work for your account – anything after the “+” sign can be used to create an alias.
These emails will be delivered to your normal Gmail inbox.
So when you are testing you can use +test.case01, +test.case02, +test.case03 and so on as your test email addresses (assuming that your application doesn’t get upset at the use of the “+” in an email address. It shouldn’t, its a valid character in the RFC http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3696#page-5)
So lets say you want to filter these test emails and label so they don’t get lost in your Inbox.
Easy, just use a Gmail filter and search for a whatever common “stem” you used in front of the period. In my example about just search for “test”.
Comments
Could also be useful for when you sign up to sites, by appending e.g. +amazon so that you can see who passes your address on and how you get on to spurious mailing lists. Then it's easy to block mail to those addresses!