How to turn off advertising in Gmail

I can’t believe I didn’t know about this until today. There are two places that advertising appears in Gmail. They can be in the side bar or at the the above the Inbox (they call these web clips).

1. To turn off ads in the sidebar, go into Mail settings -> General -> Importance signals for ads. Click on the link and opt out of advertising in Gmail and when you go to search too!
2. To turn off web clips above the Inbox, go into Mail settings -> Web Clips. Uncheck the box next to “Show my web clips above the Inbox”

There. Isn’t that better?

Disposable Gmail Addresses

This trick allows you to instantly create a disposable email address – to sign up with a website for instance.

Let’s say your name is Jane Doe and your email address is jane.doe@gmail.com. Let’s say you want to sign up one of those deal of the day websites like Groupon but you’re worried they might sell your address to spammers. Well, you can sign up using this address:

jane.doe+groupon@gmail.com

The emails from Groupon will come into your jane.doe inbox, but the “to” field will be “jane.doe+groupon@gmail.com” and you will can filter them to the trash if you want.