Adddress at gmail

Gmail, or ‘Googlemail‘ as it’s known in the British isles, has offered up another of it’s clever features to me today. Not only is it by far the cleanest, most usable web email out there but they also let you do weird and whacky things with your mail address.

First up – periods/full stops are ignored on inbound emails. For the longest time I thought that someone else had grabbed ‘‘ and I wanted it, turns out I already had it because I’d grabbed ‘‘. How stupid did I feel when I found that out? Yes, pretty stupid. So what does this mean, other than I can now have a better formatted email address? Well it means you can register at websites multiple times from the same email address for one thing, which means next time I build a user management component I have to think about filtering Gmail addresses differently. On the flipside it means you can register for sites you think might be annoying by using a variant of your name with random dots in (‘‘ anyone?)

Secondly you can add tags to your username, for example ‘+note@gmail.com’ and then you cna create a filter inside your mail to keep everything neat and tidy. Although apparently many mail servers don’t handle this as well as they should.

What’s really interesting about this is that it reminds us that email is just a related set of protocols that we happen to use in a certain way. There’s no reason why sending an email shouldn’t control something, or behave totally unexpectedly – we’re just used to the end result being an email in someone’s inbox.

That said Google’s mail is sometimes annoying. Emails are all grouped together in a conversation thread when you talk back and forth, so sometimes you can’t immediately see an email you know should be there because it’s been ‘hidden’ underneath a newer mail in the thread. In the old days you could turn this off to have a traditional mail view, but now apparently not – to which the obvious question is.. why not any more?