How to Set Up Multiple Twitter Accounts With a Single Email Address

If you have set up several twitter accounts (and I can think of plenty of good reasons to do so), you may have been frustrated at the need to create a new email account for each twitter account. But did you know that if you have a google mail (gmail) account, you don’t need to go through all that hassle? Gmail lets you insert a period anywhere in your email name, and still directs that email to the same email account. So any.body@gmail.com is the same as anybody@gmail.com. (If that’s your email address, please forgive me – you’ll probably get a flood of spam now!)

With a little experimenting, I found out that Microsoft Outlook will not accept an email address with a leading period, although I can send an email from gmail with a leading period and it gets delivered correctly. Outlook also rejects an email with a trailing period (that is, a period right before the @ sign). However, gmail will gladly accept either of those. And twitter will accept either of those as a new email address when setting up a twitter account.

According to Google mail support, gmail ignores dots in your email name: “Because Gmail doesn't recognize dots as characters within usernames, you can add or remove the dots from a Gmail address without changing the actual destination address; they'll all go to your inbox, and only yours.” (http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ctx=mail&answer=10313#)

So you can set up multiple twitter accounts using different combinations of dots, and the email relating to all those accounts will go into the same gmail box.

In fact, Google gives you two email addresses when you sign up for gmail. The second address ends in @googlemail.com. So, if I remember my math correctly, if your gmail username has 5 characters in it, using various combinations of dots in your email user name with both “gmail” and “googlemail” as endings, you can set up a total of 212 twitter accounts using the same email address. Sweet!

Does anyone want to venture a guess as to how many twitter accounts you could set up with a gmail address that has 12 letters in the username?

UPDATE: To learn how to use gmail aliases , a different approach to creating multiple gmail addresses that all point to the same primary gmail account, see the excellent article located here: http://su.pr/349kFc.