Over at Digital Inspirations, Amit offers a solid solution for an annoying problem. It’s the issue of those cockamamie e-mail addresses that web services use for file uploads. You know what I mean: the long e-mail addresses that have no less than 37 characters in them, like the one I use for my Flickr photo or Google Docs uploads. Yeesh… they’re a pain; especially when you have a small mobile device or just a short bit of time to get your data up in the cloud.

Amit outlines a very usable solution that focuses on e-mail aliases and filters. For example, he created this alias for Flickr: labnol+flickr@gmail.com. He then uses a filter (shown above) for any mail received by that alias address: it simply forwards the note to his long and seemingly random Flickr e-mail upload account.

Since I use many of the same web services as Amit, I face the same challenge, but I took a different approach that I think is a little simpler. I just created a contact for each of these services. If you browse through my Contacts for example, you’ll see a "contact" for Flickr, Google Docs, Zoho and more. Obviously, I don’t have phone numbers or other data for these contacts, but I do use their logos for the contact pics. It just seems more personal.