Winning At Sweepstakes

I’ve been reading lately about a Gmail tip that allows you to add a plus sign (+) to your current Gmail address and still have the email delivered as normal. This could be useful for a sweeper to set up a dedicated email address for applying to online sweepstakes. You will want to have a dedicated email address since you will find that the email you use to sign up for some of these sweepstakes will make it on to spam lists. This tip will let you have an address you can still read, while filtering those emails to a separate folder.

• First, create a new tag in Gmail for your sweepstakes email to go to, I like to call mine Sweeps.
• Then click on the “settings” link at the top right of the Gmail page. Choose the “Filters” link when that page loads.
• Now Click on the “Create a new filter” link at the bottom. In the To: field type “[email protected]”, for example mine would be “[email protected]” (not my real gmail account).
• Now click the “Next Step” button. Once that page loads check the checkbox next to “Apply the Label” and The checkbox next to “Skip the Inbox” and choose your new label from the drop down. Click the “Create Filter” button and you are all set.

Now when you go to enter a sweepstakes that needs an email address, you can just use: “[email protected]” and when an email is sent there it will be automatically routed to your new folder. After a while, if you find the new email address is getting anextraordinarily large amount of spam, you can simply change the filter to route any email sent there to the “Spam” folder and create a new email for your sweepstakes entries.

Since I don’t use Yahoo or Hotmail, I’m not certain if they have a similar feature, but if you use one of those and you know how to do something similar, feel free to post about it in the comments!