How To Create Throwaway Gmail Addresses

Beyond Social Media Show Segment Transcript

David Erickson: I’ve got a pro tip. This is something that I’ve been doing for a long time but I ran across a Lifehacker article by Angus Kidman that describes the practice. It’s basically how to create disposable Gmail addresses.

So if you have a Gmail account–most everybody does–you can use this tactic to subscribe to newsletters where you don’t really want to give out your email address. You want to keep your inbox clean for your normal email address.

Let’s say my email address—it is not, but let’s just for the sake of argument say my Gmail address is david@gmail.com.

What you do is you add a plus sign after the first part of your Gmail address and add whatever else onto it to distinguish it from your normal email address. So my normal email address is david@gmail.com.

If I wanted to subscribe to the Beyond Social Media Show newsletter, I could do david+bsmedia@gmail.com and that email would arrive to me but it’s a disposable email, it’s not my normal email. So you could set up a filter to send all that into a label for Beyond Social Media Show out of your inbox and you could just check that label when you wanted to.

Same thing for New York Times, if I wanted to subscribe to their newsletter: give them an email address called david+nytimes@gmail.com. And then I could, you know; it’s easy to unsubscribe to stuff that way and manage your email when you have a ton of things that you subscribe to, like I do.

BL Ochman: Me too. So wait, do you have to go into Gmail and create it or you…?

David Erickson: No. You just, as your filling out your form for your New York Times newsletter or whatever, just type in david+nytimes@gmail.com.