Organise your emails by sending them to different addresses

We’ll start with Gmail but Hotmail users should read through the steps involved, as they contain information that will become relevant from Step 4. Start by launching a web browser and go to the google mail login page. Now sign into your account. All the emails displayed in the inbox have been sent to your username@gmail.com or username@googlemail.co.uk email address. Confirm that this is the case by opening an email and clicking the ‘Show details’ link above the main body of the email message; the address to which the email has been sent appears next to the To: label.

It is also possible to receive emails sent to a slight variant of your Gmail email address, by following the form ‘youraddress+word@gmail.com’. For example, emails sent to fred.bloggs@gmail.com and fred.bloggs+newsletters@gmail.com will both be delivered to fred.bloggs@gmail.com. No configuration is required – just add the ‘+’ (plus) sign and a word or phrase of your choice to the email of your standard email address. Filters can then be created to sort mail into folders. Click the ‘Create a filter’ link to start this process.

In the To: field type in your email address, adding a ‘+’ sign and a word of your choice before the @ symbol. In this example we’re going to create an email alias to filter newsletters, so we’ve entered our email address as computeractive.workshops+newsletters@gmail.com. We’ll now use this email address when signing up for newsletters. Click the Next Step button, tick the ‘Apply the label’ option and select New Label from the dropdown menu. Now type in a suitable tag, such as ‘Newsletters’, and click OK. Click the Create Filter button and in future emails sent to and received by the computeractive.workshops+newsletters@gmail.com address will be filtered accordingly.

An essentially identical facility is available to Hotmail users and again, no configuration is required. Emails sent to computeractive.workshops@hotmail.co.uk or computeractive.workshops+newsletters@hotmail.com, for example, will be delivered to the inbox. However, the addition of a word after the ‘+’ sign means that filtering is possible. Click the Options link to the upper right of the page, select More options and then click ‘Rules for sorting new mail’. Click the New button, select To//cc address from the first dropdown menu, ‘contains’ from the second and then type the modified email address in the remaining field. Select the ‘Move to a new folder’ radio button, type in a name for the folder and click Save.

Creating email aliases in this manner offers a quick and easy way to filter and sort messages, but it provides no real disguise for your true email address. With this in mind, Hotmail provides a second way to implement aliases that will keep your real email address secret. After signing into your Hotmail account, hover the mouse pointer over the Inbox label in the left-hand pane, click the little cog icon that appears and choose the Create a Hotmail alias option from the pop-up menu. Now choose a new email address that ends with hotmail.co.uk or live.co.uk and click the Create an alias button.

Hotmail will now guide you through the process of creating a filter and folder to store emails sent to this new email alias. Ensure that the ‘A new folder’ option is selected, type in a suitable name for the folder and click the Done button. The folder will be duly created and any emails sent to the chosen address will be automatically filtered here: all you need to do is to remember to share the email alias rather than your ‘real’ email address. Up to five aliases can be created each year, up to a total of 15.