One Gmail Account = Multiple Test Email Addresses 09Nov, 2013

This article is basically a great help for Email testing purposes that we usually do while developing applications. In our everyday routine development process, multiple testing emails are required across all the popular online systems like Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook and more.

We use these email platforms to test everything from email campaigns (in collaboration with our local virtual machine library), various social tools, and the process to develop multiple user accounts on the sites. In last case i.e. to develop multiple user accounts on sites, we require hundreds of valid emails.
We generally use dummy email ids while testing.

Let’s take example with Gmail account:
Sometimes to develop multiple user accounts on sites, we may use multiple email accounts like:
test@gmail.com
mytest@gmail.com
test123@gmail.com….etc

These sample email ids sometime belongs to other people and they may get annoyed by receiving these unwanted emails because of our testing process. Or we may need to sign up with multiple Gmail accounts to receive verification emails. So to avoid these circumstances, we should use our own email ids for testing purposes. Fact is that with only one Gmail account, we can access “infinite” email addresses using single Gmail account.

For example, Gmail account for general testing is test@gmail.com:
We could also use any of these following email addresses:
test+1@gmail.com
test+2@gmail.com
test+3@gmail.com
test+12@gmail.com
test+123@gmail.com
test+test@gmail.com, …etc

Concept is simple to add + sign and then any random string following it to generate new email address.
All emails will deliver to same Gmail account and it lets us sign up to a website again and again as a “different” user.

Note: This concept of “One Gmail Account = Multiple Test Email Addresses” is not applicable to sign up with all sites. Some popular sites like Facebook.com, Moz.com etc. prohibit this process of signing up with multiple email addresses using single Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook or other account

Posted by: Amandeep Singh / In: Testing and Tagged ,
Cam

One thought on “One Gmail Account = Multiple Test Email Addresses”

  1. Thank BitsnTricks for sharing this wonderful article.

    Being a developer, I was facing many issues with having multiple test emails for testing purpose

    Either we have to use the multiple test emails or we have to reset our database each time we want to test our functionality. But this trick help us doing the same very easily and smoothly

    Thanks

    Keep posting new and interesting articles…

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