Friday, August 15, 2008

Interact with Websites via Easy to Remember Email Addresses

Source: http://www.labnol.org/internet/email/interact-with-websites-via-easy-email-addresses/4230/

You know how easy it is to interact with websites through email. For instance, you can upload photos to Flickr, publish blogs on Tumblr, add tasks to your To Do list in Remember The Milk, upload files to Google Docs, save notes in Evernote, send videos to YouTube, convert documents .. and so much more with a simple email message.

Each of these services provide you with a secret (and often impossible to remember) email address that you are not supposed to share because anything sent to that address will instantly get published / uploaded on to your account.

emails

Since it is fairly hard for anyone to remember these addresses, the alias feature of Gmail can come quite handy here. Lets see how using Flickr as an example.

Setup a Gmail account (say labnol@gmail.com) and create a new filter. In the To: field, type labnol+flickr@gmail.com and then put your secret Flickr email address in the "Forward it to:" field. Save.

gmail-filter

Now any picture attachment that is addressed to labnol+flickr@gmail.com will get published on Flickr. You can create similar aliases for other services like labnol+youtube@gmail.com for YouTube, labnol+gdocs@gmail.com for Google Docs, and so on.

So your single Gmail account acts as a central hub and redirects messages to the relevant service based on the alias used in the address. And since these email aliases are so logical, you will probably have no trouble remembering them even if your email address book isn’t around.

Also see: Create Email Polls using Gmail

Interact with Websites via Easy to Remember Email Addresses - Digital Inspiration