It's pretty cool when you are browsing the web and find resources for tricks 'n' tidbits for using your Gmail account, or even better - entire sites dedicated to "Gmail Gems". This last one had something exactly what I was looking for, a tip on how to automatically forward all your hotmail e-mail to your Gmail account using some nifty software.

The first one had something that I had never heard about with mail servers at all which is called "plussing". Now, I previously talked about how the periods in your username don't matter (ex: JohnDoe@ is the same as John.Doe@). Well with plus you address your username, followed by a "+" (plus symbol), and then any label or text string that your want. For example, if your username is JohnDoe and you were signing up for a mailing list, you could use the address JohnDoe+MailingListName@gmail.com and then setup a filter in Gmail to look for the "+MailingListName" and apply an action on the e-mail automatically.

You may experience some problems with "plussing" as it appears it is not universally supported. When I attempt to send an e-mail to my Gmail account from my regular ISP account, I get what is callled a silent failure, where the e-mail doesn't go through, but never get's returned either. I sent a 2nd e-mail from my Hotmail account and it worked fine. So good luck playing with this.

One user who was basically being a troll in the comments pointed out some interesting item though. Apparently his mail server also supports "plussing" (sorry he did not list the server software), but his handles it even better than Gmail in that it will automatically sorts the e-mail into IMAP folders on the server without the need to setup filters. Very cool.