Just when you think Google apps (like Gmail) can’t get any better – they are free after all – you go and learn about a feature that makes you wonder how you ever lived without it. I am talking about the virtual email addresses that you can create on the fly. If you have no idea what I am talking about, don’t worry I wouldn’t have either – until now.
With the use of these virtual email address – a name I have latched on to to describe this function; a single Gmail address can act like an unlimited number of distinct email addresses to the outside world. for example: if you have the Gmail email address of yourname@gmail.com we all know that you can receive emails at that address and can even have Gmail collect email from external accounts. What is specifically unique is that Google has enabled a dynamic interpreter to its Gmail delivery engine and with the addition of a simple “+” sign at the end of you proper user name and before the “@gmail.com” domain address you can customize the email address you have mail sent to and manage it in a single Gmail account. So, yourname@gmail.com, yourname+01@gmail.com, yourname+customtrackingcodehere@gmail.com all deliver to the “yourname” account but maintain their targeted addresses.
The other fantastic thing about this feature is that you do not have to pre-configure these alternate addresses ahead of time. This alone makes the feature unique and highly useful for many things; but recently for us, in the testing of a highly complex email campaign.
You see, we have recently launched a campaign for client that is managed from a custom Marketing Database that feeds event trigger based email lists to a third party email delivery service (in this case SilverPop). We had approximately 60 different email templates that could be triggered by a variety of business rules and we wanted to make sure that each email was specifically processed and sent for the correct business reasons. We created an email list control file of email seeds based on each distinct delivery reason and set a batch upload to the API – we used the yourname+customtrackingcodehere@gmail.com email address method to ensure that there was only one intended message to each email address in the batch file and included tracking details in the email address to compare the email received by each address to the matrix of rules indicating which email the address should have received. By using the virtual email address capability of Gmail, we were able to send complete sets of emails to 4 different testers with only 4 Gmail email accounts, rather than the 240 different email accounts that would have been required to conduct the same level of testing without it. We know that we could have pre-configured all these addresses as email aliases in a standard POP or Exchange messaging system – but we didn’t have to go through that extra work – and that’s what we found so useful about this solution.
Have you found a similar tool or have other observations, let me know.
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