Gmail Magic: How One Email Can Manage All Your AWS Environments
Managing multiple environments like development, testing, and production is common for anyone working with cloud platforms such as AWS. However, if you’re still creating separate email accounts for each of these environments, it’s time to reconsider.
Recently, I stumbled upon a neat little trick that can make managing AWS accounts easier — particularly if you’re using Gmail. Although this trick may work with other email providers, I can guarantee it works with Gmail.
Traditional Approach
Let’s consider the usual process: If you want to create AWS accounts for development, testing, and production, you might create three separate Gmail accounts:
- company_name_dev@gmail.com
- company_name_test@gmail.com
- company_name_prod@gmail.com
This means three different email logins for AWS, Gmail, and anything else that requires credentials. This quickly becomes a hassle, especially when managing multiple OTPs, invoices, and alerts across different accounts.
The One-Email Trick
What if I told you that you can handle all three AWS accounts with a single Gmail account? You might be thinking:
“Shut up, Ajinkya! 🤫 That’s impossible!”
But hear me out — this is not only possible but surprisingly simple.
Instead of creating separate emails, you can append a plus sign (+) and add custom text to your email address. Gmail will ignore the text after the plus sign, but AWS will treat it as a new email. So when you create AWS accounts, your email addresses could look like this:
- company_name+aws-dev@gmail.com
- company_name+aws-test@gmail.com
- company_name+aws-prod@gmail.com
Notice that all three emails will still direct to one Gmail inbox — company_name@gmail.com. You only need to manage one email account, but AWS will treat each of these variations as separate.
Why Does This Work?
Gmail allows you to add a plus sign (+) after your email and append any additional text. This trick helps organize incoming emails because everything still routes to your primary inbox.
With this setup:
- You can manage three distinct AWS accounts from one email.
- All important emails like OTPs, invoices, Free Tier alerts, CloudWatch billing alerts, and budget notifications will land in one inbox.
- No need to remember passwords for multiple email accounts, yet you keep separate AWS environments.
Additional Flexibility 🤩
You can even reuse the same credit card and phone number across these accounts, thanks to AWS’ flexibility. This means no juggling between different payment methods or verification processes.
Pro Tip
Always enable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) across all your AWS accounts. The root user has full control over the system, and MFA ensures added security. If someone gains access to your credentials, it could cause serious damage. So better safe than sorry!
Conclusion
Whether you’re a beginner, intermediate, or advanced user, this Gmail trick can simplify how you manage AWS environments. It centralizes email communication, saves time, and keeps your workflow streamlined.
Stop creating multiple email accounts and give this trick a try — you’ll thank yourself later!
