I know some of you have more than one email account. Your “real” account that you use with friends, and your fake account that you use to avoid junk mail.

So let me ask you, how well is that working? Your real email account gets out there is ways you don’t realize, and now of course you’re seeing junk mail in that account as well.

If you have Gmail, you just need one account. For starters, Gmail has probably the single best spam filter out there just for your regular email. BUT, if you want to have a separate email address for sites that require an email address even though you’d rather not give them your real one, then here’s a little trick for you…

Add a + (plus sign) to your existing email account right before the @ sign and then you can put whatever you want AFTER the + sign followed by @gmail.com

Here’s an example, my email address is laurie@tek-chic.com. If a site insists on an email address that I don’t want to get mail from, I give them the following address: laurie+junkmail@gmail.com.

Gmail IGNORES the plus sign and anything that follows it prior to the @ symbol. I can put laurie+leavemealone@gmail.com or as many other things I can think of.

It’s easy to set up a filter in Gmail to tell it to automatically delete anything that you get with that address. Here’s an article to tell you how to create a filter: https://www.lifewire.com/create-rules-in-gmail-4172416. One of the options in the filter will be to Delete. Choose that and future mail to your “special” email address will be deleted with it arrives.

Happy Quarantining!