The Gmail dot trick, explained

How it works

To Gmail, john.smith@gmail.com, johnsmith@gmail.com and j.o.h.n.s.m.i.t.h@gmail.com are all the same mailbox. The dots are decoration; delivery ignores them completely.

A name of n characters has 2 to the power of n-1 dot arrangements. An eight-letter name therefore gives 128 addresses, all arriving in one place. Add the +plus form, where anything between the + and the @ is ignored, and the supply is effectively endless.

googlemail.com is a third variation. It is an older name for the same service and still delivers, so every dot arrangement works twice over.

What it is useful for

Signing up twice where a site allows one account per address, without maintaining a second mailbox. Each variation looks like a different person to the form.

Tracing who leaked your address. Give each site its own arrangement, and when mail starts arriving at the one you only gave to a particular shop, you know where it came from.

Testing what you build. A sign-up flow needs a fresh address every run, and this gives you as many as you want without touching a mail server.

Where it stops working

Some sites strip dots before they compare addresses, precisely because this is well known. Those will see a duplicate and refuse the second sign-up.

More sites reject +plus addresses than reject dots, because the plus form is the more obvious of the two. If a form refuses one, try the other — dots look like an ordinary name and get through more often.

And it is not privacy. Every variation leads back to the same mailbox, so it hides nothing from anyone who knows the trick. It organises mail; it does not conceal it.

Generating them here

This site does the arranging for you, on shared accounts rather than your own, so the mail arrives somewhere you can read without signing in to anything.

Pick the dots style and press Generate for a single address, or use bulk for up to 500 at once and download the list. Make one of them active and its inbox shows any verification code sent to it.