[did you know?] 3 more reasons to use Gmail

No, I don't get paid by Google for writing this article.

But actually, I do get paid by Google.  Because I use Google Adsense on my websites.

But no, they're not paying me to advertise Gmail.  Duh.  Does Gmail even need advertising?

Anyway, if you have a Gmail address, like say yourname@gmail.com, did you know that...

1. your.name@gmail.com also works?  ..as well as y.ourname@gmail.com, yo.urname@gmail.com, and so on until yournam.e@gmail.com?  Get it?  So if, say, your name is Maria Nobody, and you signed up for marian@gmail.com because it was available and marianobody@gmail.com wasn't, but then people started calling you Marian instead of Maria (and oh how it hurts to hear people get your name wrong, right?) because of your e-mail address, you don't have to sign up for a new email address and instead you can tell your friends (or former friends) that your e-mail address is now maria.n@gmail.com.  Good luck getting called Maria and not Marian anymore.  No need to go to your Gmail settings or anywhere else to enable this.  It's automatic.
2. yourname+keyword@gmail.com will always go to yourname@gmail.com.  
   You can use this technique to subscribe to some mailing lists that you would want to filter later on.  Like, say, if you're subscribing to Company ABC's mailing list (who does that?), you can use yourname+abc@gmail.com to sign up.  That way, you can set up a filter in Gmail to do whatever you want it to with mail sent to an address with "+abc" in it.
   Or let's say your name is Ivana Pee and you have a Gmail address, ivanapee@gmail.com.  Then you got married to a hunk of a dude named Johannes Freely.  Instead of applying for a new e-mail address like ivanapeefreely, or ivana.p.freely, or whatever other permutation, you can now just inform your friends that your new e-mail address is ivanapee+freely@gmail.com.
   A problem though is some websites and applications check some e-mail address inputs and when they see a "+", they will tell you it's an invalid e-mail address.  Think of it this way.  Those are like transistor radios in this era of black & white boob tubes.
3. yourname@googlemail.com also works?
   In the same way, then, you can setup filters for mail sent to yourname@googlemail.com (or the other way around, to yourname@gmail.com) to do whatever you want to do with it.  Like maybe you dislike that so many spam gets sent to yourname@gmail.com, so you can filter all mail to yourname@gmail.com to directly go to the Trash or wherever, and then from now on you can just use yourname@googlemail.com.

I guess any combination of items 1, 2, or 3 above works as well.

Since I started using Gmail and abandoned my Yahoo! Mail which I use now only for subscriptions to spam, I never looked back.  With these 3 new-found features of Gmail, I have more reason to love Gmail.  And be a fan of Google.  And Apple.  The usual suspects.  Oh hey, but I still love Yahoo! Groups.  And man, suddenly  I got nostalgic about my first time I got caught in the world wide web, when I opened Internet Explorer and saw the Yahoo! search home page back in 1995.  Hey, we don't even call the web the world wide web anymore.  Thanks, mom.

Anyway, I learned all these "new" features of Gmail from these two articles: one on Macworld (http://goo.gl/Kn0A2) and one on PC World (http://goo.gl/bHJC0) which the former referred to.