Using Special Characters in a GMail Address

It's a little known fact that your GMail address can be manipulated by using special characters.

For instance if your email address is johngreen@academy.org you can reference your mailbox using an extended form of the address such as johngreen+year2@academy.org

Even without having johngreen+year2 listed as an alias on your account you'll find that the mail will still find it's way into the inbox. GMail simply ignores everything after the plus ("+") sign.

Why might this be useful?

You can up set up rules on the inbox to action on the content of the To field. So by providing a custom form of the address to different parties you can easily categorise inbound mail.

Dots (".") are also handled in a special way. Although valid on other email systems GMail ignores this character  and doesn't recognise periods as characters in addresses.

If you sign up for a consumer account with fredbrown@gmail.com you also own all variations of that address that contains dots - such as fred.brown@gmail.com.

However this behaviour only applies to consumer accounts.

 For accounts that exists within G Suite organisations the address john.green@academy.org and johngreen@academy.org are separate accounts.