IS your inbox flooded with unnecessary promotional emails and you’re not sure why?
Gmail has a trick you can use to check who is sharing your email and maybe other personal data with third parties.
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The trick was recently highlighted by tech website BGR and involves you giving away an altered email address.
It explained in an article: “Say, for example, you’re buying a shirt at Old Navy and, as part of the checkout process, they ask for your email address.
“If your name is JohnDoe@gmail, you should instead enter your email address as [email protected].
“The rationale behind this trick is that Gmail automatically ignores any characters that follow a plus sign.
“In turn, you’ll still be able to receive emails from Old Navy, but you’ll also be able to tell if Old Navy is sharing your data with others if you start noticing emails from third parties sent to the [email protected] address.”
So you’ll still get the emails to your original account but you will be able to differentiate by checking how the sender has typed your email address.
You may want to try giving away a few different variations of your email via that technique to find the culprit sharing your information to third parities.
You can also use the trick to help organise your inbox.
If you have a business on the side, instead of using “[email protected]” you can tell people to email “[email protected]”.
The emails will still get sent to your one inbox but you can use the search bar to just look at emails specifically about your business by typing in the altered email address.
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This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk
