The Gmail hack that will consolidate your inbox and mean you’ll only ever need one email address for all of your online registrations

FOR anyone that has more than one social media account on the same platform, you will know the hassle it can be trying to juggle multiple email accounts.

Even registering for services online can be a pain if they only allow an email address to be used once, forcing you to open a second and add another password to your brain's list of "must remember" phrases.

But what if you could bypass the need for ever creating a second email contact line?

Thanks to Gmail, you can.

The most commonly used emailing service globally, Gmail recognises its users' desires to consolidate their electronic mail, and has a simple hack built-in to its software to make our lives significantly easier.

When sending and receiving emails, Gmail will automatically ignore anything typed into an address that follows a plus sign, prior to the "@" symbol.

For example, an email sent to "thesun@gmail.co.uk" would also be delivered to the same inbox even if you typed "thesun+work@gmail.co.uk" into the recipient box.

So why is this so handy?

Say you run an Instagram account for your business, but also have a personal account for your own snaps.

The photo sharing platform only allows for an email address to be used once in registration, meaning anyone that operates multiple accounts needs a secondary email.

Using the Gmail trick, you use the same email address for multiple accounts, simply altering it at registration using the "+" symbol and a keyword of your choosing - something like "social" or "gram" may make it easier to remember.

Instagram will register the emails as separate addresses, but in fact all messages for both accounts will be sent to the same inbox.

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The same is true for Facebook and Twitter.

Address lines can be altered for emails ending with the standard "@gmail", as well as those with custom domain names.

The trick also allows you to easily filter your Inbox, as Gmail will show you which messages have been sent to an address with a "+" sign in it.

This means you can then easily tag these and move them to a separate folder, leaving your most important emails in your main inbox.