You remember that scene in The Thick of It where Malcolm is chewing out two different people in two different conversations at the same time, and they wonder how he’s doing it, and it turns out he’s screaming into two cell phones, one in each hand?
I was reminded of this when a colleague revealed to me that he had two different gmail accounts. He explained:
One of them (***@gmail.com) I give to humans, and the other I give to non-humans. I started this a long time ago. Emails to ***@gmail.com are far more likely to be important.
Clever!
I do this. A long time ago, I would sometimes add a period/full stop in the middle, like [email protected]. I did that if suspected the address would be sold or harvested. It goes to the same inbox with or without the period, but if I started getting messages from different senders to the one with the period I knew it’d been sold.
OK, that reminds me—the other day I saw an article in the New Yorker that mentioned Jim Fletcher. He’s in a major off-Broadway show! I haven’t seen Jim in decades, so I wanted to send him a message saying hi, maybe we can have you over for dinner sometime. But I couldn’t find an email for him! It’s easy to find the emails of academics, right there on our webpages and CVs. Even famous academics like Paul Krugman and Steven Pinker have open emails. But for everybody else, emails are tough to find. I ended up sending a message to his theater troupe asking them to forward it to him, but I have no idea if that will happen.
Agreed that it’s hard — and if anything, getting harder — to find contact info for non-academics. More puzzling: it’s often painful to find email addresses for European academics. I’ve sometimes been reduced to scouring papers and seeing if the “corresponding author” line has an email address.
Most puzzling of all is that you don’t have a “junk” email address!
Oh, I hope that works out! David has recently been receiving emails with sheet music attachments from eager participants in a music competition in the Pacific Northwest. The piano accompanist is also a David Kellogg but, like Jim Fletcher, has no public-facing email.
Apple’s “Hide my Email” makes it possible to give a different email to every website. Then, you can tell exactly who sold your email.
Wow!
In theory you could do this with Gmail if you could be bothered: https://gmail.googleblog.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-more-from-your.html
I’ve seen some people use the +tag in gmail to add a suffix for the website for which a form is entered, e.g. ***[email protected] for registering on Amazon. I also remember reading on some security blog that emails with those tags are often filtered out when breached datasets are being sold, since people who use them a) are likely more privacy/security-savvy and thus harder targets for spam or fraud and b) could alert the breached entity using the tag. Sadly, I don’t remember where I read this and how trustworthy the source was.
What about those of us who lead lonely lives and look forward to all emails and dunning phone calls to lighten up our declining days? During the increasing shortage of daylight in the northern hemisphere, a phone call asking for verification of my social security number or a request for Nancy Carlson, makes for a good break from humdrum activities such as straightening out a medical bill.
This makes you wonder if Malcolm, “the cursing scottsman”, has two sim cards
I have 4 gmail accounts for various purposes, which I admit may be a trifle excessive. Also handy for one-off throw away is mailinator.com, for those annoying sites that make you register just to read the one article you’re interested in.
Nice. I made one specifically to use in Google maps and YouTube only and on this I don’t receive any spam whatsoever. That’s almost a little bit offending.
I’ve been doing this for almost 20 years now. Is this really news to you that people do this?
I have a work email (purchased domain to look corporate, but run through gmail engine…both very reasonable) for gigs. Then a yahoo email for personal interactions. And a hotmail account for places I suspect will spam me (when forced to give an email).
And then for sites like this (grrr…why ask for my email), asdf.com or aaa.com or whatever my fingers roll over.
Anon:
Yes, this really was news to me.
Anything after a plus sign in a Gmail address is ignored (by Gmail).
So [email protected] and [email protected] will both go to [email protected]
You can use these in filters to have them deleted, sent to spam, etc.
Another option is [email protected]. You can then go to mailinator.com and read your email, and so can anyone else in the world who uses the same mailinator.com email address. They call it a public inbox, and all emails are deleted after a short time.
The email I use to comment on this website is the one I give out to various websites, not my gmail, for just such a purpose. It’s not that I don’t trust Andrew, but I make it a habit of only using my gmail when I need to.
Oh my, I have over 30 gmail accounts and just take it for granted as good practice.