At some point in any career invariably one will be ask to test or review a web application (or an app). Most of them require logging in as different users with different roles. On top, web applications normally require users to validate their email address. Testers / reviewers using different profiles traditionally needed to use different email accounts, for each new user they create in the application.
Managing multiple email accounts is a lot of overhead and becomes cumbersome and frustrating quickly.
What if I told you that there is an easy way to have different email addresses that lead all to the same inbox and that you can achieve that with ZERO click per additional email address? Read on.
It’s very simple. Sign up for a free email account with Gmail.com, Google’s email service. Let’s assume you just created a new email address as such: joe.sixpack@gmail.com
Now about the “secret” part: Google delivers email to this inbox even if you change the email address slightly. After the username part of the email address (everything left to the @ sign) you can append a plus (+) and then you can use any combination of letters, numbers and minus (-) signs. For example joe.sixpack+1@gmail.com or joe.sixpack+test-user-1@gmail.com – It’s important to know that any email sent to an address such as joe.sixpack+test-user-1@gmail.com will be delivered to your joe.sixpack@gmail.com inbox!
That is very cool if you need to create different user accounts. Create just one gmail account and then sign up with the web application you would like to test using the trick above:
- joe.sixpack+advisor1@gmail.com
- joe.sixpack+user1@gmail.com
It’s important to consider that this little trick only works with gmail.com addresses. That’s it! Have fun testing / reviewing your web applications! 👋