This is a little more complicated, but I own the domain I use for email and I set up a subdomain for commercial emails. So if my regular email is bob@mail.com (it's not, by the way), then I configure *@biz.mail.com to forward into my regular email. Then when i sign up for something or have to give out an email address for an online purchase, I use the name of the company as the first part of the address: gevalia@biz.mail.com, amazon@biz.mail.com, etc. You can just make up the name on the fly, because anything in that space will get forwarded.

With this, I can check my spam to see what addresses it's coming from, and route those specific addresses to :BLACKHOLE: without compromising the rest of my commercial accounts.

It's also funny when I'm on the phone and I give people an email address with their own company name in it.

Granted, web hosting costs me $6/mo which is significantly more than a free google account, but I will control my email address forever and I get to do cool stuff like this.

There are plenty of free coupon sites out there.

not exactly ground breaking stuff.

Gmail's +alias is a nice feature, and I use it when I can. Folks just need to be aware that it will not always work.

So when I glance at my email client and see where my new messages are, I already have a good idea what to expect. The "Junk" emails are typically automatically forwarded to a catch-all "Junk mail folder" so I don't have to look at them.

I keep telling everyone to set up their email addresses like this; that way, you're never giving out your "real" email address to companies or entities that would just spam the living hell out of you or sell it to others who would.

Not that I would ever do something like this but it's pretty easy to fudge the query string on the image they send and change the expiration date, too...

I can see where it might be a problem if you hand-wrote your email address on a opt-in card. In the worst case applicable to this story, you won't get email from Quizno's.

People with tildas in their email username have my sympathies as well. "You know, the squiggly thing next to the one?"

Gmail doesn't offer traditional aliases, but you can receive messages sent to your.username+any.alias@gmail.com. For example, messages sent to jane.doe+notes@gmail.com are delivered to jane.doe@gmail.com.

You can set up filters to automatically direct these messages to Trash, apply a label or star, skip the inbox, or forward to another email account. [mail.google.com]

I spend way too much time customizing my email accounts...