Gmail trick: using multiple addresses for one single account

(photo by marc johns)

You probably encountered this before: you want to test a website’s registration form that has e-mail verification or you need to create several accounts for different roles.
You’ve used your personal e-mail address, your work mail, your friend’s address, but you finally ran out of e-mail addresses (or friends to ask).

Say goodbye to fake testing addresses with the following tricks.

First trick

Gmail has a wildcard for the + sign as it doesn’t recognize it nor any characters that follow it. This means that if you have an address like senor.developez@gmail.com, you can use the following:

senor.developez+001@gmail.com

This works for the form’s e-mail validation and creates a different account but Gmail recognizes it as the very same address. You’ll also receive your verification e-mail, yay!
Even better, you can go on and increment the numbers (e.g. +002)

Second trick

Remember that time when you tried to create your first Gmail address, the name was already taken, and it surely didn’t work separating your first name and last name with dots?
Well, here’s the explanation: Gmail doesn’t recognize the dot, so the second version is:

senordevelopez@gmail.com

This is a cool trick as it can be used to create several accounts for Twitter or Facebook using the same Gmail account.

Third trick

Another Easter egg is to use googlemail as the domain name:

senordevelopez@googlemail.com

By using these three simple tricks you’ll be able to create any number of accounts for testing/development purposes. Finally!

Hope this was as helpful to you as it was to our team at Hipwerk.

P.S. Thanks @robertonodi for the tip!

Originally published at blog.hipwerk.com on November 9, 2014.