Whenever you release a new version of any application that requires login, you need to test account creation functionality. There are a few possible ways:
- Most likely you already have a few accounts with your gmail, yahoo, etc personal emails. You can certainly delete those from your system, but sometimes you have some test data in there that you want to keep
- You can continue creating email addresses at any of the web email providers — that requires a rather significant amount of time as they ask you for a lot of information
This is where Gmail and automatic labels come to to the rescue:
- Let’s say my email is mike@gmail.com
- Gmail has a very useful feature where you can send an email to mike+anythingYouWantHere@gmail.com and that email will end up in your mailbox
- “+” helps mimic “email alias” functionality. You can then apply filters within Gmail
- That pretty much provides you with unlimited number of email addresses without all the hassle of setting them up
This technique is useful to automatically file emails and can also help you figure out which of the million websites that you signed up for actually sold your email address. It will not help you stop spam, but at least you will know who is responsible for it — sign up to websites using some system like this: mike+websiteName@gmail.com.
Here is help page on this subject from Gmail: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=12096&topic=13271
