The Old Gmail+1 Trick

I was asked recently what I meant by the “old Gmail+1” trick in my post “Minecraft: The Techy Bits”

Well, let me explain for those unaware of this very handy trick.

Say you have a bunch of students (whether they are in earlier grades and they don’t have school email addresses yet or your school doesn’t do email addresses period) and there is a website you really need to register your class of students on. Who wants to spend an hour or more creating email addresses just for using to register on a website and never be used again?!

Here’s where Gmail comes in. Take for example you have a personal or throwaway Gmail account; blah@gmail.com. When it comes to registering multiple email addresses on a website you can use blah+1@gmail.com, blah+2@gmail.com, and so on. You can literally add anything after your username (blah+bananas@gmail.com) and all emails sent to those accounts will go into your blah@gmail.com inbox.

Cool, huh? And very handy, I have used it many times when working with younger grades.