Gmail Secrets and Tips You May Not Know

Gmail has a lot of nifty little secrets that other free web mail services like yahoo, hotmail, excite and inbox do not have. Experimenting with Gmail when you are bored may lead to other secrets and tips.

Spammers have recently discovered the secret that Gmail is the best mail service to use because they don't close accounts for spam as readily as hotmail and yahoo. Gmail may temporarily block access to your account for 24 hours but I've never heard of them actually closing down anyone's account for spam, but I'd like to think they do. Gmail also has made their spam reporting harder then it should be. Most users will report spam to abuse@ or spam@. Gmail goes to the length of having you fill in a page to make their spam process quicker, as though anyone has the time to do Google's job for them. So though Gmail is more secure against fake spam reports, it's also slowly becoming well known as a spammer's safe haven.

An important secret / tip though not exclusive to Gmail is, Spammers are less likely to pick up your email address if you mix it up with numbers. Such as l734johnson39@gmail.com verses ljohnson@gmail.com it's much easier to guess plain usernames or real name email addresses then those with additional figures. So add in a few digits, like your year of birth or your address mixed up. Just remember to not use something that would relate to your secret question, pin number or password.

To help put a stop to those Spammers, one Gmail secret is the period. The period? Yes the simple period. Many users pick email addresses like l.johnson@gmail.com but Gmail ignores those periods. So that would mean the real email address is ljohnson@gmail.com This means you could place the period anywhere in your email address and it would still go to your Gmail account. This comes in handy if you want to sort certain emails from someone to a different folder. Just add the filter for the email address they are using.

Gmail Plus email address is an interesting secret too. You put a "+" after your username and add characters. So, l.johnson@gmail.com cane have the alias of l.johnshon+accociatedcontentproducter@gmail.com and Gmail will ignore the "+" and all the characters up to the "@" and deliver all mail to l.johnson@gmail.com. So once again you can add a filter to your account which will deliver those emails to any folder you wish.

When in your Gmail spam folder, simply clicking on an email and pressing "Not Spam" isn't enough. It will just simply move it to the inbox. A secret I discovered is, in your Spam folder, at the top right hand corner click "Older Version". You will notice it change to read "Newer Version". If you don't see that change, then you are still in the newer version, click it again. Apparently the "Older Version" has the ability to learn that when you click "Not Spam" it knows to not put it in the spam folder in the future. This is important to those who don't have time to keep remembering to go through their huge spam folder.

These tips and secrets should help you take full advantage of your Gmail account. As with these tips you can have unlimited email addresses, that is until Gmail decides to put a stop to this.