Q: “I have lots of Salesforce logins. How do I make my username always match my email address?”

A: If you use Gmail, learn the power of pluses and periods!

Gmail tolerates extra characters in the email address. Let’s take the arbitrary email address datanerd@gmail.com. Emailing any of the following addresses will reach that recipient:

• datanerd+dev.sandbox01@gmail.com
• datanerd+partial.sandbox@gmail.com
• datanerd+full.sandbox@gmail.com
• datanerd+integration01@gmail.com
• data.nerd+demo_user@gmail.com
• d.a.t.a.n.e.r.d@gmail.com

In a nutshell:

1. Gmail addresses tolerate a plus sign followed by any sequence of letters, numbers, periods, and underscores after your username and before the @ symbol.
2. Gmail addresses tolerate periods anywhere before the @ symbol.

Armed with this knowledge, I make each of my usernames match its email address–way less mental strain that way!

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Another awesome benefit of this feature is it enables easy searching of emails.

Let’s say I have an org called “NewKillerApp”. If I put +NewKillerApp in the username and email address I use for this org, searching on “+NewKillerApp” in my Gmail turns up all the emails specifically related to that org.

Here are the full details (. . . from a 2008 Google post)

Thanks to former coworker Luis Botero for reminding me of this cool feature!