How To Trace Spammers with Gmail

First I am going to tell you about a feature in Gmail that is quite unknown, but yet useful!

What most of people with Gmail do not know is that you have not just been given the exact address you chose, but also a few different modifications. Let us use this as an example:

Say you chose Example@gmail.com when you signed up with gmail. Then most of us would send emails to you using Example@gmail.com. But what people do not know is that you can use dots, everywhere at the beginning of your address, like this:

E.x.a.m.p.l.e@gmail.com

or

E.xample@gmail.com

And so on! You can send a mail to any of these and it would still land up in the same inbox! But this is just the beginning!

Here's the next good function Google gave you as a secret gift when you signed up:

You are able to put a plus "+" after the beginning of your address and an optional text. Here is an example:

Example+123test@gmail.com

or

Example+name@gmail.com

And so on!

This is the most useful feature, and with that in mind, we will now go on to the tracing part.

Now we are going to put this to practice. When signing up to a suspicious site you can really make use of this feature to determine whether the site gave your address to spammers. In the field where you are supposed to put your email, write you email as always but add the "plus feature", like this:

example+SuspiciousSite@gmail.com

Or put the name of the particular site behind the plus symbol.

If you are receiving spam-mails later, you can now check which address the spammers have sent the mail to. With this method you can find out who gave away your mail adress.