Your email address has a secret "+" button — and it fights spam

Here's a trick hiding in plain sight: with Gmail (and many other providers like Outlook and iCloud), you can add a plus sign and any word to your address, and messages still land in your normal inbox. So jane@gmail.com can become jane+shopping@gmail.com or jane+netflix@gmail.com. To the mail system, it's the same account — the part after the + is simply ignored during delivery.

Why bother? Because that little tag becomes a tracking label. Sign up for a store newsletter as jane+store@gmail.com. If spam later arrives addressed to jane+store, you know exactly who leaked or sold your address — no guessing required. You can then filter or block anything sent to that specific alias.

Gmail has a second version of the same idea: it ignores dots entirely. j.ane@gmail.com and jane@gmail.com reach the same inbox. Combined with the plus trick, you get endless disposable-looking variations of one real address, each easy to sort with an automatic filter.

The catch: some websites reject the + character as "invalid," and a determined spammer can just strip the tag off. It won't stop every problem — but as a free, built-in way to organize signups and catch data leaks, it's one of the easiest wins in your inbox.