Let’s use an example email address of    YourName@gmail.com.   Now, if you want to do something special with certain emails, you can add an extension to the first part of the address with a “+.”  Now it might look like this:  YourName+special@gmail.com.  The word “special” can be anything, even a person’s last name or other unique word you want to use.  Gmail will deliver the email because the first part before the “+” is a valid address.

Now, all you have to do is to create labels or filters to do whatever you want automatically with emails sent to this special address.  Here are some ideas about how you might use this feature:

• Use a transaction number or ID after the +, giving this address to participants in a transaction.  You can then automatically capture all transaction related email in one place.
• Use this feature to create a request email from your website or elsewhere that responds with a Gmail canned response.  You can deliver special reports this way.
• I use it for research, creating labels that match the words after the +.  Thus, any site I find that would be a good tech topic, I send with a “+tech.”  It gets filed away automatically to my tech research label.
• Use for ordering things, or for sites where you might want to be rid of them later, as you can do auto-delete when you no longer want email from them.

I’m sure that you can think of lots more to do with this feature, as it’s quite handy.

I have used “Starring” for a while to store away and easily access articles for my writing research.  However, then I must call up the starred items and go through them.  By using “tagging,” you can greatly enhance your ability to locate previous articles.  Using a combination of starring and tagging, you can group your content for efficient retrieval later.

[important]There’s a short video showing how to do this step-by-step in the Premium Content below.[/important]{+++}
Premium Content

I use “Starring” and “Tagging” in Google Reader to file away huge amounts of research and material that comes in every day via RSS feeds from my blog subscriptions.  As I write for clients, and topics vary from real estate to technology, I get a lot of posts, and need to be able to read them in detail when I have time.

I also like to mark those that I might want to write about for this blog.  As there are several hundred posts that I’ve scanned the title and excerpt, but haven’t had time to read yet, I need a way to store them for easy location later.  Here’s what I do:

• I tag the interesting posts with the appropriate subject tag to get it into a folder for that topic.  In the case of articles related to technology, I tag them “tech.”
• I star those posts that look like they may be something I’d also like to write about here, or comment on them and link back.

This way, when I have the time to read, I can pull up all the items tagged as “tech” and read those I select.  If they have a star, then I also decide if I do still want to write about them.  If so, the star stays, like a to-do tag, until the post is written.  If not, I remove the star.  Here’s a video on this system: