An easy Gmail hack for signing up multiple user accounts that require an email address

Emails Address: Or just create a second account for yourself with the same email For upon |One problem that educators sometimes face is signing students up for a free account on sites that require a unique email address for each user account. This is especially true in school settings in which students don’t have their own Google email addresses. It’s also a pain point for teachers with younger students who don’t have email and/or don’t yet know how to use it for a site’s registration. And for the truly rebellious, it’s problematic when their students are too young for the site’s terms of service.

An underutilized Gmail trick can be the perfect solution to this problem.

If you add “+1” (or any numbers/letters) to the end of your Gmail handle, Gmail recognizes it as belonging to your email address but it looks like a unique email address to the site for which you are registering an account. So, if my school Gmail address is Mr.Geisel@awesomeschool.org, I can sign students up for a site with usernames following the pattern of: Mr.Geisel+1@awesomeschool.org, Mr.Geisel+2@awesomeschool.org, Mr.Geisel+3@awesomeschool.org…Mr.Geisel+34@awesomeschool.org.

The site where I’m creating the new accounts is going to see 34 different email addresses. When it sends confirmation emails, however, all of the messages will arrive in my mr.geisel@awesomeschool.org inbox.

This can help protect student privacy and teacher sanity. Speaking of teacher sanity: if you make a spreadsheet of who was assigned each email address, it will minimize your aggravation when students forget and ask you to look up.

This hack can also come in handy for personal use in case you have reason to have multiple accounts on the same site (double coupons, anyone?) but want the notifications to all come to the same inbox.

Recently A Blogger

One cool use of this I recently saw was a blogger who decided she was going to create a one-time grant to help fund someone taking a big risk. Rather than publicly post her regular email address, she added “+passiongrant” to her Gmail username. As she received hundreds or perhaps thousands of messages seeking her free money, she presumably had a filter set up so that these messages bypassed her inbox and went straight to a dedicated folder.

A fork on this idea could be to have a standard “+” version of your email that you use when companies make you provide an email address (for example mrgeisel+spam@gmail.com). By filtering messages sent to that unique version of your Gmail, you could automatically whisk all of those “free shipping for purchases over $100” emails directly to a place where you never have to see them. Just make sure to check it on the week of your birthday so you don’t miss out on that free bowl at Noodles & Company:)