Using Alias in Gmail to get additional email addresses

You know that you can get extra email address without having to create one ? These are known as email Aliases. 

If your email address is hello@gmail.com , any email that’s addressed to either he.ll.o@gmail.com or hello+world@gmail.com will also be delivered to your main inbox since Gmail ignores dots and anything that’s after the plus symbol in email usernames. This will not work for Google Apps accounts.

Therefore, theoretically speaking, you get an unlimited number of email addresses with one Gmail account. This gets even more interesting if you are using Gmail with Google Apps.

Now the question is what will you use them for ?

1. SEPARATE SPAM: Enter an alias like sjainid+us@gmail.com  or "sjain.id@gmail.com" when entering email id into an unknown site that may later send you spam. Now you can setup a filter in Gmail to look for "to: sjainid+us@gmail.com" or "to:"sjain.id@gmail.com" and delete those emails or put them in a separate folder. 

2. IDENTIFY MARKETING CAMPAIGNS: If you run an advert in regular or digital media you can identify the source of inquiry by giving out different email id's for example for adverts in different city's you can give different email id like : tns+delhi@gmail.com, tns+lucknow@gmail.com  or tns+012016@gmail.com or tns+332016@gmail.com. This will help you identify to which advert the person is responding to.

3. SEPARATE PRIORITY EMAILS: Give out an id like sjainid+sos@gmail.com and setup a filter to Star these automatically or also forward them to you assistant so she\he can inform you of an important message. 

4. SEPARATE EMAILS FOR DIFFERENT DEPARTMENTS: By giving out different email id's for different departments  you can setup email filters to forward the same to the responsible person. For example if you own tns@gmail.com you have separate department id's like : tns+sales@gmail.com, tns+support@gmail.com ,  tns+accounts@gmail.com ,  tns+projects@gmail.com

These are just some of the ways, I am sure you can think of more creative ways to use Aliases.

Email Aliases in Gmail for Google Apps

In the case of Google Apps, you can assign nicknames to your email account and messages that are addressed to the nickname (or alias) are also delivered to you.

For instance, if you run a website at example.com, you can have one mail email address and then setup aliases like tips@example.com (for blog tips),advertise@example.com (for potential advertisers) and so on. Thus you have to deal with only one inbox.

To setup an email alias in Google Apps, log in to your admin's Gmail account  and open admin.google.com  in another tab and click the “Users” option.

Select the email username for which you wish to setup aliases and then click “Add an alias” to associate another email username with this user. You may associate up to 30 different nicknames per user in Google Apps.

When you reply to an email that’s addressed to one of your nicknames, the “From” address may still have your main email address. You can however change that quite easily. To reply with the Alias instead of your main account do the following.

Open your Gmail Inbox – > Settings – > Accounts and click “add another email address you own” under “send mail as.” Type your new email alias here, verify the code and you’ll now have an option to decide which of your email addresses should show up in the “From” field.