Filtering the Inflow - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 221

address construction in GMail
Now let's talk for a minute about what's going to go into your mailbox.
You'll be receiving alerts, updates, notiications about changed pages, and
so on. he good thing about these types of e-mails is that they're computer-
generated. What's so great about that? hey have patterns that you can ilter
on. But before we get to the iltering part, let's irst look at how you can
control the address where the alerts are delivered.
What? You have only one address on GMail? No you don't. Even if you don't
have more than one account, you have far more than one address.
In fact, you have practically an ininite number of addresses, thanks to
GMail's plus-addressing and dot-addressing capabilities. For simplicity's
sake, stick to one or the other. I recommend the plus-addressing.
What plus-addressing means is that you can append a text string to your
e-mail address, and GMail will deliver the e-mail to you. So if your address
is [e-mail] , you can use a plus sign ( + ) to put a string
between informationtrapping and @gmail.com , like this:
[e-mail]
And you can even use several plus signs in a row, like this:
[e-mail]
hat may be a silly example, but what it shows is that for every service from
which you get an alert, such as GoogleAlert, Trackle, Watch hat Page, and
so on, you can set a unique address using plus-addressing. Which makes
iltering very simple: as soon as the ilter hits the address, it performs the
action you specify. (And incidentally, if you start getting spam to one of
those addresses, you'll know where it originated and you'll be able to dump
those e-mails right into the bit bucket.)
tip
For some reason, if you go into your gMail account and try to
send yourself an e-mail using plus-addressing, it won't work: the
e-mail will bounce. So if you want to play with this feature, be sure
to send yourself an e-mail from outside the gMail system.
Of course, iltering won't work every time. Sometimes you'll be looking for
keywords. Sometimes you'll be looking for where an e-mail came from. And
sometimes alert services (like Google's e-mail alerts) don't support e-mail