50 ms·

Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

• thrill 6y ago
  90% of the spam I get when I occasionally review it has dropped the dot in some silly effort to canonicalize my address, so yeah, the dot matters, as I filter the non-dotted address.
  • stan_rogers 6y ago
    Same here. The "no dot goes to trash" rule catches an awful lot of spam.
• chrisgd 6y ago
  My email is firstlast I use first.last for subscriptions I am unsure I want to keep. I can then filter out based on to address and also use diff combinations when I already know I don’t want them contacting me (firs.tlast) for example
  • dhritzkiv 6y ago
    If you use the + character (e.g. `firstlast+subscriptions`) it'll still arrive to your `firstlast` inbox, but will allow you to filter it more meaningfully.
    • jumhyn 6y ago
      I've been using this trick for a while (usually 'firstlast+per_service_identifier') and I've encountered more than a few systems which erroneously claim that any email address containing a '+' is invalid.
      • moviuro 6y ago
        That's why I now own my domain, and added the first([\.-]suffix)?@last.tld -> first@last.tld mapping at my provider. For selfhosting, there's `recipient_delimiter = +-.` in postfix' config. [0] The most infuriating ones are those where you can subscribe with the '+', but the unsubscribe function errors on it. [0] https://try.popho.be/email.html https://try.popho.be/email.html
        • davinic 6y ago
          Also in many cases I am allowed to proceed with the +, but never receive confirmation emails because the sending system chokes.
      • w-m 6y ago
        You could encode the service_identifier in a pattern of dots around the letters of firstlast for cases where the '+' is not allowed. But that's probably hard to do in a way that's easy to encode on the fly, unless you already know morse or something similar.
        • jumhyn 6y ago
          Also doesn't work if I'm not using Gmail :)
      • stephenhuey 6y ago
        I have used it all the time over a dozen years, both for site-specific email addresses and also for having lots of handy test email addresses in my personal app development. Often I just wish I had been more disciplined about using it even more for site-specific addresses, but fortunately more websites about friendly about unsubscribing these days.
      • Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
        I have a fun story about this. I had an account on some site and didn't use it for years. When I go back and try to login they demand I reset my password and verify my email. Sure, no problem. Thing is I used a foo+bar@ email and they had a little sanitizing script running that removed it when submitting the form. Rewriting their spaghetti and getting the form to submit successfully was fun. I was very surprised it worked. Guess they weren't sanitizing on the backend.
    • shanecleveland 6y ago
      Some services recognize this and do not allow email "aliases." One reason is that it essentially would allow you to sign up for an endless number of trials with the same email account.
      • justusthane 6y ago
        The level-up for this trick is if you have your own domain, and a provider that lets you use a wildcard alias (Fastmail, for one), you can use anything@yourdomain.com. On the fly. No way to block that!
        • shanecleveland 6y ago
          I like that idea. I use Fastmail, in fact. So I could use hn@yourdomain.com or any address specific to a service. I guess the risk would be potentially not remembering that was done or exactly what was used. Also, could keep you locked into Fastmail or limited to providers who have this same feature.
          • saagarjha 6y ago
            Luckily, there's a lot of providers that offer this :)
        • Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
          I did that for a while, and then my provider decided that people using catch-all e-mail addresses were causing their systems to store too much spam and stopped letting people use them. That left me in a slight bind as I had used well over 50 different e-mail addresses. I had switched to Gmail as my primary e-mail address, but hadn't bothered changing my accounts. Luckily, they allowed a very easy way to create forwarding addresses and basically set it up to forward 50+ addresses to one.
    • chrisgd 6y ago
      So “firstlast+@gmail.com”?
• joncrane 6y ago
  What about + signs? That's the trick I use.
  • dbbk 6y ago
    They also don't matter, but you already know this
  • caseysoftware 6y ago
    In theory, providers/servers should ignore everything from the + to the @ so that should work just about everywhere else. And since most forms don't filter that out, you can make numerous "unique" addresses connected to a single one. Now odds are, someone is going to respond with the one service where the + becomes significant..
    • pricechild 6y ago
      > providers/servers should ignore everything from the + to the @ Why? I'm not sure it has ever been a standard and it's certainly not a default implementation for most providers?
      • moviuro 6y ago
        A quick google search returns https://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~watrous/plus-signs-in-email-addresses.html https://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~watrous/plus-signs-in-email-addr... . Although not standard, its use is "legal"
        • deleted 6y ago
          [deleted]
      • warkdarrior 6y ago
        There is a standard, RFC 5233 on subaddressing: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5233 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5233 Adoption is a mixed bag.
    • judge2020 6y ago
• ghastmaster 6y ago
  This is indeed the case. I have checked it myself. The link below shows how this can be used maliciously. https://jameshfisher.com/2018/04/07/the-dots-do-matter-how-to-scam-a-gmail-user/ https://jameshfisher.com/2018/04/07/the-dots-do-matter-how-t... I do not know if this has been mitigated.
  • newsbinator 6y ago
    OP of that post has an ad at the bottom for their product that I actually found compelling. It's a screencast tool- but instead of putting a video of your face in the corner, it overlays/ghosts your face on top of the full screen you're sharing. Now sure how well it would work in practice. Maybe it's too distracting. But it looks like a neat thing to try.
  • tialaramex 6y ago
    James is wrong, this is Netflix's fault. The same "scam" would work under a variety of circumstances because Netflix relies on something it has no reason to believe is true. Maybe you signed up to Netflix but your house mate thinks she did, she gets an email because of Eve, now you're both paying for Netflix, but actually she's paying for Eve's account. Netflix could make this mistake with postal addresses even, if for some reason they used postal addresses. You get a letter from Netflix, you don't notice it's addressed to Eve, who had stupidly written your address instead of hers, you pay for her Netflix. This is a data protection violation, data processors have a duty to take reasonable care that the personal information they have about data subjects is correct. If you need it, make sure it's accurate. If you don't need it, don't collect it.
    • Spivak 6y ago
      This is actually Google's fault. Because Google is large enough Netflix could be nice and have special handling for Gmail addresses but this would be going against the email RFC that says $inbox1+$subaddr@domain == $inbox2+$subaddr@domain iff $inbox1 and $inbox2 are identical. Netflix has zero idea how any particular email operator mangles or maps inboxes to actual users. Apple's private email service maps all sorts of inboxes to the same actual person. Mailinator maps every address to everyone.
• Santosh83 6y ago
  I have been getting financial emails from several people for many years at my GMail ID. They apparently have given my address but without the dot. But what mystifies me is how these people keep going for years without ever realising they aren't getting account transaction emails (from their banks), notifications of stock trades, even OTP emails etc. How is it possible for people to use these services for years without ever wondering why they aren't getting the routine emails they're supposed to get or even why they aren't getting the OTP email they had generated? Also none of the institutions I contacted to ask their clients to update their correct email bothered to do so. On the contrary they sent me back what looked like automated replies asking if their customer service was satisfactory. At this point I'm sorely tempted to delete my email and start over with another service provider. The nuisance of having to delete almost a dozen emails not meant for you every single day is annoying to say the least. At least with spam you get it sent to spam folder and there it stays. Confidential emails not meant for you is awkward and uncomfortable to have to put up with.
  • tzs 6y ago
    > But what mystifies me is how these people keep going for years without ever realising they aren't getting account transaction emails (from their banks), notifications of stock trades, even OTP emails etc. How is it possible for people to use these services for years without ever wondering why they aren't getting the routine emails they're supposed to get or even why they aren't getting the OTP email they had generated? Perhaps they also get paper statements in the mail and text message notifications, and don't even know that they also are being sent redundant emails? (It can go the other way, too. I think I've got some of my financial institutions configured to only send me email and text. If one was also still sending paper statements and those were going to the wrong address, I'd never notice).
  • ses1984 6y ago
    Set up a filter? Did you ever try to contact the institution where the emails come from?
    • Santosh83 6y ago
• plibither8 6y ago
  That, and '@googlemail.com'. example@gmail.com is equivalent to example@googlemail.com.
  • bjohnson225 6y ago
    @googlemail.com was the default address for a few years in the UK because of a legal dispute. If you sent an email it'd always come from the longer domain.
    • judge2020 6y ago
      For reference: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2005/oct/19/news.business https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2005/oct/19/news.busi...
• jameskilton 6y ago
  Except for when it does matter! GSuite accounts do care. first.name@company.com is a different address than firstname@company.com. I learned that one the hard way.
  • wil421 6y ago
    Yes the article mentions as an admin you could remove the dots but they always matter.
• AltruisticGapHN 6y ago
  I still get occasional emails for `firstnamelastname@gmail.com` while I registered `firstname.lastname@gmail.com` Which seems to contradict what the article says, since the article suggests anyone who registered my `firstnamelastname@gmail.com` would own mine. Or is the article suggesting actually nobody ever registered `firstnamelastname@gmail.com` and some idiots just think "oh i need to write to firstname lastname" (one of many who share my firstname/lastname in French) and they just compose that email address? I don't get it. edit: but moral of the story I think it's really a bad idea to register based on a real firstname/lastname -- I'm tired of getting junk ... and worse, getting invoices for other people for a service I also use. I got confused once and actually made a payment which was not meant for me >_>
  • Ciantic 6y ago
    Yes, "nobody ever registered `firstnamelastname@gmail.com". You own it. I keep getting email without dots because I too have common name someone mistakenly sends to.
  • brmgb 6y ago
    > Which seems to contradict what the article says, since the article suggests anyone who registered my `firstnamelastname@gmail.com` would own mine. It doesn't. firstnamelastname@gmail.com is also your address. Nobody could have registred it. > Or is the article suggesting actually nobody ever registered `firstnamelastname@gmail.com` and some idiots just think "oh i need to write to firstname lastname" (one of many who share my firstname/lastname in French) and they just compose that email address? I don't get it. Yes, that's what is happening. If you get unintended emails, their intended destination is yet another address.
• rockyj 6y ago
  Then why did they allow someone else to create an email like mine without the dot and I even get the occasional mail addressed to them. This is really shady, specially for an important service like email.
  • tialaramex 6y ago
    They didn't. You get email because somebody either typo's their similar address or they simply think that's their address when it isn't.
    • rockyj 6y ago
      Not sure, I contacted this person, since I got their phone number from one of their emails (e.g. they registered for a hotel). I specifically asked them if they made a typo, according to them they have been using this email for years (maybe they lied but why would they).
      • YetAnotherNick 6y ago
        This is inconclusive test, and if you ask people whether they made a mistake in the signup, they will likely answer no. Try to send a mail to that account, and if you receive a reply that is a real test.
      • spuz 6y ago
        Either that email address sends mail to your inbox or theirs - there's no way it could be some mix of the two.
      • derimagia 6y ago
        They might have just been using it in terms of giving it out as theirs for years. Doesn't mean they've ever had access. Or they could have typoed it a long time ago and now actually think that that they've logged in with it when they never have.
      • paxys 6y ago
        They aren't lying, just confused. They probably made a hotmail.com account and assumed it would work with gmail.com.
• hathym 6y ago
  not 100% true, gmail won't allow you to send to john....smith@gmail for example
  • jeffbee 6y ago
    That's got more to do with gmail's composer than with their mailer. "foo + bar@baz"@domain.net is a valid email address but gmail won't permit you to type it in.
  • jcranmer 6y ago
    john.....smith@gmail.com is not a legal email address: the local-part is a dot-atom (or quoted-string) production, so successive dots are not legal outside of a quoted string.
• reallydontask 6y ago
  I think that for Enterprise customers (G-Suite) dots might matter as I tried to create a new (bot) account in Github with my email sans dots and I never received the email (email was not @gmail.com)
  • lstamour 6y ago
    This is mentioned in the article, yes. It is likely to preserve backwards compatibility with pre-existing email addresses from before the switch to Gmail.
• fbn79 6y ago
  Good. So I can re-subscribe to the same tryout service again and again adding dots to my address without the need of use disposable mailbox (banned for sure) or create a new one time address.
• dave84 6y ago
  I spent far too much of my time trying to explain this to Humanity.com’s support after someone created an account using a dotless variant of my email. I didn’t want to freeze the guy out of his account as I imagine he was using it for shift work notifications but in the end they just told me to change the password. Their support repeatedly insisted that gmail was broken and I should contact Google.
  • YetAnotherNick 6y ago
    I don't understand your problem. So Humanity.com made two accounts which both sent mail to the same gmail account, right? In that case it is easy to ignore or mark as spam or go to forget password and close the second account.
  • Spivak 6y ago
    Because this is really Google's problem. If someone gives you an email address you're not supposed to touch anything before the '@' and assume that if the inboxes aren't exactly identical then they are separate addresses. Because on some (most) mail servers they will be separate. Humanity is guilty of not actually verifying ownership/control of the inbox before letting the person attach it to their account but they were absolutely right to treat it as a separate address.
    • dave84 6y ago
      Obviously. My issues is the difficulty in explaining this to tech support even when confronted with evidence.
• fsflover 6y ago
  Older discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16781959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16781959
• html5web 6y ago
  That’s not always true. I’ve sent an email from not Gmail service, it returned the non-exists error
• blackearl 6y ago
  You can add memos as well: jdoe+ExampleMemo@gmail.com
• AaronFriel 6y ago
  Dots do matter in G Suite email addresses, and that can be quite confusing for people that know this trick.
• randtrain34 6y ago
  I'm surprised that the "+" operator isn't commonly known either in gmail (eg. I can type "johnsmith+345@gmail.com", and mail sent to that address will redirect to "johnsmith@gmail.com"
• Brajeshwar 6y ago
  I have about 3 people sharing my Gmail Address to their banks, credit card, insurances, etc.
• wayanon 6y ago
  I got an email from Australia with the appointment for my spousal visa application, I'm also apparently looking for a new BMW in Cape Town and I also have a partner I visit in Paris and we order Chicken McNuggets on Uber Eats.
• wkalt 6y ago
  If someone emails you without a dot and you reply from your dotted address, it will look strange in the receiver's email client.
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    Depends on the client–the ones I use understand that people can reply back with a different address than the one I sent an email to. (I frequently see @cs.university.edu → @university.edu, or @gmail.com → @companyname.com.)
• runxel 6y ago
  There is also the alias of googlemail.com on the domain level... Always a cause of big headaches. johnsmith@gmail.com john.smith@gmail.com johnsm.ith+foobar@gmail.com j.oh.nsmith@googlemail.com all are pointing to the same logical email address.
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    The email you see in my profile is backed by a Gmail account, but I doubt you would know that if I didn't tell you. Hopefully I haven't made your headache worse ;)
    • hundchenkatze 6y ago
      You can see that it's backed by gmail by looking at the MX records. https://www.whatsmydns.net/#MX/saagarjha.com https://www.whatsmydns.net/#MX/saagarjha.com
• blindm 6y ago
  I love the way most services treat dotted addresses as separate addresses. So for example if you wanted multiple accounts on $service you could register the following: john.doe@gmail.com j.ohndoe@gmail.com jo.hndoe@gmail.com joh.ndoe@gmail.com johnd.oe@gmail.com johndo.e@gmail.com And now you have six accounts, with the bonus of receiving mail in the same inbox for each account!
  • har33sh 6y ago
    You can also add multiple dots :)
    • blindm 6y ago
      Yes but I imagine most services would spot that as an invalid address? Although it's worth trying something like john...doe@googlemail.com To see if it passes as a valid address. Don't use this for evil, okay?
      • justin_oaks 6y ago
        No, not multiple dots in a row. They still have to be between two non-dot characters. Two dots in the email instead of one: j.o.hndoe@gmail.com j.oh.ndoe@gmail.com j.ohn.doe@gmail.com j.ohnd.oe@gmail.com j.ohndo.e@gmail.com jo.h.ndoe@gmail.com ... johnd.o.e@gmail.com
  • black3r 6y ago
    And if you somehow didn't know there is the possibility of adding +anything to your email, so that you can do john.doe+servicename@gmail.com and know which service leaked your email to spammers/advertisers
  • toddmatthews 6y ago
    you can do that with gmail with the + character. john.doe+beta@gmail.com john.doe+delta@gmail.com they all go to the same address
  • 6y ago
• devy 6y ago
  Dots does matter in GSuite's email addresses (those are the email addresses for enterprise via work or school.) Also in the email name part of the email address, anything after + (plug sign) and before the @ (at sign) don't matter either. [1] This is the same behavior for personal Gmail and GSuite email (Gmail for enterprises) [1]: https://gizmodo.com/how-to-use-the-infinite-number-of-email-addresses-gmail-1609458192 https://gizmodo.com/how-to-use-the-infinite-number-of-email-...
  • kevincox 6y ago
    It definitely is. For example I get a lot of emails sent to me+ni@mydomian for "Not Important" which I use kind of like an RSS reader. They never appear in my inbox and I catch up on them every once and a while. You can do this for a wide variety of things and combine it with filters to get a lot of extra value from your email.
  • curiousgal 6y ago
    You'd be surprised how many legacy registration systems break because of the + 'trick'. Ever since I got a basic Gsuite plan and set up a catch-all email address, I can just use websitename@mydomain and then use filters which is oh so practical!
• NewOrderNow 6y ago
  I used this to get cheap dreamhost service back in the day by signing up once with my email with the dot and once without the dot. I now use the account without the dot permanently and it always throws me off. Worth it for the 1 year of savings :)
• aasasd 6y ago
  > Your Gmail address is unique. If anyone tries to create a Gmail account with a dotted version of your username, they'll get an error saying the username is already taken. Well then I'd like to know how someone keeps signing up for services with my address, even though I never click any confirmation links. The email used for signing up specifically differs from mine by a dot. (Though I don't think I'll complain to Google, seeing as it's just a dedicated address for shady sites, it's free, and Google aren't known for answering complaints anyway.)
  • mormegil 6y ago
    > Though I don't think I'll complain to Google Don't. Google has nothing to do with it. Complain to the services/companies sending e-mails to unconfirmed addresses. It is unfortunately fairly common.
  • URSpider94 6y ago
    The reason is because those services don't use an email confirmation process, either because they don't know better, or because they are email marketers who are happy to have every address that they can get and don't really care who gets their mail (the email equivalent of writing "OR CURRENT RESIDENT" on postal mail)
• treebornfrog 6y ago
  Got a guy with my same first name and surname. Been getting his bank statements, his amazon orders, class emails, share purchases/sales. Its a joke. Edit: been happening for around 5 years. Its also entertaining at the same time to see what he's doing on another continent. I'm torn, dammit Google!
  • Implicated 6y ago
    I have this problem, except it's a whole nation (seemingly) of people due to how common my last name is in a specific country. My address is [first initial][last name]@gmail so anyone with a first name that starts with the same letter as mine and the same last name (which, there are SO MANY). I get; job offers family photos (I typically respond letting these people know they're not getting through to whoever they're intending) verizon bills (I'm also a verizon customer and they absolutely refuse to take my email off of the other two accounts - I've also texted both accounts since they're numbers have come through various times in the correspondences and they don't even acknowledge my communication let alone update their accounts - they're always late on their payments, but have the newest iPhone's all the time :D) purchase receipts from so many retailers I don't keep track (some of these people have real silly amounts of money) auto purchase receipts bank emails lease offers (just today I had to respond to a leasing agent who was trying to let someone know they got a place they were trying to rent in NYC for crazy money) It's mind blowing to me how many people get their email address wrong and miss so many important emails, seemingly without ever realizing it.
• zaksoup 6y ago
  This is the source of a low-impact but still interesting scam: Scammer signs up for netflix free trial with "your" email (but it's really some new combination with different dots). Scammer runs out the free trial. YOU get an email saying "gotta pay for netflix." You're confused but chalk it up to some computer glitch somewhere and click the link to log in. Your password isn't taking but that's fine you just reset it. Finally, you're logged in, and you plug in your credit card and everything seems fine. You maybe don't even notice the two charges on your next credit card bill. Yes, it's definitely convenient that you can have "multiple" email addresses that all point to the same inbox, but the issue is that identity providers don't treat them as all the same logical email address which creates opportunities for scams like these or worse.
• cmckn 6y ago
  I signed up years ago with a dot in my username, before I knew this. Folks can reach me sans dot, but my username still has the dot (so, outgoing mail does too). It bothers me a lot! If there is a Googler reading this with the power to remove the dot from my username, please email me (with or without the dot) :)
  • jeffbee 6y ago
    You misunderstand the article. Your username has no dots, and dots are allowed but ignored when your username is referenced (when logging in, when receiving messages, etc). Nobody can remove the dots from your username because they aren't there in the first place. If you just want a different number of dots in your outbound mails, go to the gmail settings and add a new presentation under "Send mail as ..." and set it as the default.
    • cmckn 6y ago
      > add a new presentation under "Send mail as ..." and set it as the default. That's what I needed -- thanks! The dot still shows in my Gmail profile, and it's not possible to remove the "Send mail as..." address with the dot; which is odd. But yes I'm also able to log in without the dot.
• sriku 6y ago
  Not only do dots not matter, you can suffix "+<anything>" to your user name before the "@gmail.com" and it will still come to your email address. I actually love this "+" feature and use it a lot .. like send an email to "+bookmark@gmail.com" to bookmark a link, or register with "+nospam" and setup a filter for that address if anyone sends me email on that. This is supported by icloud and fastmail too.
  • sydd 6y ago
    Also a good check if the site has some sloppy implementation. More than once have I seen that my "+" email was not accepted because of invalid characters. I take this as a sign to not trust the site's security too.
    • ben0x539 6y ago
      If I were a site accepting email addresses, I could see rejecting "+" stuff because chances are it's people trying to pull something funny like registering multiple accounts when I only want one per email address. If I were less confrontational I might just silently strip the "+" part.
      • wlll 6y ago
        Sites that do any of that stuff are infuriating. Great if that's what you're going for.
        • ben0x539 6y ago
          My understanding is that it's okay to be infuriating if I have an analytics query or something claiming that it'll not affect 99ish % of users and also save customer support a bunch of work.
    • bityard 6y ago
      This is not always accidental. Facebook, for example, does not allow a '+' in your email address and you cannot tell me that the engineers at Facebook don't know about the "+" in gmail addresses. The simplest explanation is that Facebook wants to make sure you are not signing up with an alias account. That is, they want your _real_ address, just like they insist on having your real name and other personal info.
• charwalker 6y ago
  It also disregards info after a + like: validemail+ignored@gmail.com You can sign up for sites like: validemail+facebook@gmail.com and it will still reach your inbox fine but be very obvious if your info is sold or stolen.
• Freeboots 6y ago
  Fun Fact: Dots DO matter in gmails search bar: from:<some email>@gmail.com and from:<some>.<email>@gmail.com return different results.
• robbyking 6y ago
  A coworker of mine got an email once containing important scholarship information intended for a high school kid in Florida. He did a little looking online and found the kid's and his parent's actual email addresses and forwarded the email to them. So here's where it gets weird/dumb: the kid replies to my friend and his parents and says, "hey mom, you put the wrong email address on my application, there's no dot in mine." So my coworker, being the only tech savvy person on the thread replies. "Well, actually, [...]" and explains how dots are(n't) handled in Gmail address. Then the parents then reply and write, "but that's your old Gmail address, we had to get you a new one when we moved to Florida." At this point my coworker gave up and the kid presumably lost his scholarship because his family didn't know you could keep your Gmail address when you moved houses. (If you're reading this, hi Jake H.!)
  • johnchristopher 6y ago
    > At this point my coworker gave up and the kid presumably lost his scholarship because his family didn't know you could keep your Gmail address when you moved houses. Didn't your colleague forward the information ?
    • evolve2k 6y ago
      I think their meaning was they stopped replying to further email back and forth with people who clearly were very far from understanding and whose ongoing conversation was becoming increasingly frustrating to deal with due to their misplace mental model around how email works which then then relied upon to continue to correspond with the sender.
  • jasonv 6y ago
    I occasionally see a public-ish figure with a website where they publish their email address. This last week, saw someone who advertised their "@cox.com" address. I move way too often to have any kind of confidence in a utility email address like that.
    • x3n0ph3n3 6y ago
• cylentwolf 6y ago
  This has only recently been a problem for me. There is a nice gentleman with my same name who picked up the gmail address without the dot. He lives in Arizona. Has a library membership. Plays in a softball league. I am not sure how much of my email he gets. I haven't set up a filter yet but I will eventually. I like seeing what my doppelganger is up to some times.
  • URSpider94 6y ago
    No, he did not "pick up" that address. Google won't issue a second address that matches the concatenation of the characters without dots. So, if I have john.smith@gmail.com, Google will not issue anyone else johnsmith@, j.ohnsmith@, joh.nsmith@gmail.com or any other combination to another user. What does often happen is that people FORGET what their actual email address is when they hand it out to other people or write it down on forms. Or their friends or family mis-remember it. Your doppleganger may have actually been issued the address johnny.smith, or smith.johnny, but just forgets.
• lilSebastian 6y ago
  I registered forename.surname@gmail.com, I often get mail for someone else forenamesurname@gmail.com. I noe have no idea who else they are routing email intended to the former.
• lovetocode 6y ago
  I use a similar behavior with the plus symbol to identify who leaks me email address.
• renewiltord 6y ago
  Someone registered for Facebook with myname@gmail.com. I'd registered with my.name@gmail.com and when I got the email that I'd added the account I clicked yes before reading (that's a mistake you make at most once) and now that guy has a Facebook account I can't log in to and I can't remove this email from the account and I can't remove the notifications either. Part of the reason is that Facebook verifies you're the owner of the email if you say "someone else has my email" by sending you an email which you have to reply to. But Google will reply to all of them with the canonical sign-up so mine has my.name@gmail.com that the reply goes out with, which doesn't match so I'm stuck marking all Facebook notifications as spam.
  • johnkarahalis 6y ago
    Password reset?
    • renewiltord 6y ago
      Won't let you in unless your friends (well, his friends) validate it's you. Tried it!
  • jeffbee 6y ago
    In gmail, open the settings, go to "Accounts", add an address to "Send mail as ..." then you can send mail with as many dots as you like.
    • renewiltord 6y ago
      Could have sworn I tried this. Let me give it another shot! Thank you! EDIT: Interesting, they no longer send me that email. Probably got flagged.
    • miguelrochefort 6y ago
      Thank you. I had no idea.
  • sixothree 6y ago
    I am convinced someone with a gmail address similar to mine is causing me issues. I think at one time gmail may have considered dots differently. Because I was getting emails for an account that was clearly not mine. But the email address had a dot and the domain was not .com.
• kjhughes 6y ago
  I think that companies' failure to verify their users' email addresses during signup is a serious problem that goes beyond any dot confusion. When John Smith signs up for an account using JohnSmith@gmail.com (or John.Smith@gmail.com), and the company trusts John Smith to have provided the email address accurately, three parties are affected: Both John Smiths and the company itself. Yes, verifying email address creates a bit more signup friction, but the consequences of getting it wrong way outweigh that friction for the privacy risk and confusion it causes (unless all the company cares about is a meaningless sign-up metric).
  • aimor 6y ago
    Amazon has been sending me someone else's order details for about a year now. It's crazy to me for multiple reasons: 1. They send this information (order details, name, address, tracking numbers, receipt) without requiring a confirmation email. In fact, in their system the email on the other guy's account is labeled "unverified". 2. The emails contain no way to stop future emails. There's no "unsubscribe", "this is not me", "contact us", etc. Every link is to an Amazon page which expects the user to be logged in to the correct account. 3. The system does not sufficiently lock old accounts when the account email is reused. One suggestion from Amazon was to create a new account using my email, which should lock the other account. This did not happen, so now there are two accounts able to send Amazon emails to me with no way to tell them apart. 4. The Amazon website doesn't verify the user's account before displaying order details. If I click on a link from the other person's order return (or other types of links), Amazon opens up to my account but displays information from their order. It's confusing to see someone else's "refund status" alongside my account name on the official Amazon.com site. 5. Getting this fixed is a pain in the ass. I call, they say they'll fix it. I call, they suggest something else. I call, they escalate, try something else again. I chat, can't be handled over chat, they call me, try another thing. I'm not sure why they won't remove the email from his account or contact him and ask him to remove it.
  • hnick 6y ago
    Some of them also only allow you to unsubscribe or contact support through logging in to your account. Which I could easily do through a password reset but that's illegal so I'm not going to bother. I'm still getting credit card statements from an Indian bank. I can confirm the PDF password is easily cracked :)
• paxys 6y ago
  Everyone in this thread is replying with instances of receiving emails meant for other people, but dots have nothing to do with that. It's people typing in the wrong email address in a signup page (with dots or without), and the service not verifying it. The latter is what really needs to be fixed. I personally find this Gmail feature (as well as the ability to append +anything to your email address) extremely useful.
  • joemaffei 6y ago
    Another possibility is that companies try to guess your email address. I recently got an email thanking me for buying a lawnmower that I never bought. The buyer's mailing address was in the email, so I sent him a letter. He replied saying he's "old school", and doesn't have an email account. He has no idea how the manufacturer got my email address, as he had left the email address field blank when filling out the warranty form. The only explanation I can come up with is that they just guessed it based on first and last name.
  • bstrong 6y ago
    In my experience, it's mostly the situations where people give their emails in person that are a problem: Receipts from in-store purchases (and in-store credit card signups), hotel reservations and rewards programs, EMR signups, lawyers offices, banks, realtors, etc. Websites are pretty good at verifying email addresses these days. The real world, not so much. The super funny part is when you try to ask the bank/doctor/etc. to stop sending someone else's personal info to your email address, and they tell you they can't make that change since you aren't the account owner.
  • atuladhar 6y ago
    Thank you! I am also confused by some of these complaints.
• sleepybrett 6y ago
  I got a bunch of mortgage documentation for another person with my name (i assume they either are a 1-t brett (or a misheard brent, brad or brit) or their email contains their middle initial or someone misheard their last name over the phone ( there are several spellings for my last name that are more or less homophones ).. either way I now have enough information to easily steal their identity. I feel like most, majorish, online services do email verification, but when you are giving your email address to a someone over the phone, that's where most of the problems start.
• coder4life 6y ago
  yeah I've known and used this forever to trace sources of spam, etc
• _kst_ 6y ago
  I have a similar issue, though it's not related to Gmail. I registered an obvious joke email address from a free service. I'm not going to type it here, but imagine something similar to "fakeaddress@example.com". (I could have used a gmail address for the same purpose.) Occasionally someone will fill out an online form that asks for an email address, and decide to use an obvious fake, assuming that any emails will go into the proverbial bit bucket. That's why I sometimes get emails about someone's health insurance or airline tickets. It can get a bit frustrating when online support forms insist on asking for account information when the whole point is that I don't have an account. (Yes, I know I set myself up for this.)
• HelloNurse 6y ago
  The obvious address of <my common name>.<my very common surname>@gmail.com was still available a couple of years after Gmail was introduced, and I rushed to register it despite already getting a little unintended email on other predictable free mail addresses. I couldn't anticipate the density of misplaced email (allowing me to link multiple parties to the same idiot), the personal insistence of some people (come on, it's me! Your friend —! What do you mean by "I don't know you"?), the ready-made drama (in varied roles: vanished boyfriend, investor in shady businesses, councilman, delinquent debtor...), the quality of delicate misplaced information (with medical records and resumes topping the more obvious invoices, home addresses and bank letters) and the variety of accounts (including e.g. Spotify and a couple of dating sites). Over the years, I've noticed a slight decrease in incorrect addresses entered by human beings matched by an increase of automated emails to incorrectly registered accounts.
• slartibardfast0 6y ago
  I have a first.last@gmail address from the beta, and after numerous misunderstandings I've learned to use very precise language when attempting to help: First establish that they're speaking to the wrong person. Then suggest the nature of their mistake is a simple omission of a letter or number. never offer a 'no big deal' or de-escalation until they've acknowledged the problem, otherwise the real recipient will never get the email!
  • cwkoss 6y ago
    Reply with this - people are less likely to argue if they think you are a robot: This message was created automatically by mail delivery software. A message that you sent has not yet been delivered to one or more of its recipients after more than 24 hours on the queue on mail.example.com. The message identifier is: 1JYIJ1-0008Ew-JK The date of the message is: <date> The address to which the message has not yet been delivered is: <your email>.
    • slartibardfast0 6y ago
      oh I did try that approach! it was generally ignored completely except for one hilariously angry person.
• miguelrochefort 6y ago
  I created my Gmail account as firstname.lastname@gmail.com (by mistake), but I always create accounts on website using firstnamelastname@gmail.com. As a result, I often have problems when communicating by email with companies, as they can't match origin of the email (firstname.lastname@gmail.com) to my account email (firstnamelastname@gmail.com).
  • drivebycomment 6y ago
    You can change your default "from" and "reply-to" addresses: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370
• schwinn140 6y ago
  PREACH. This is hands-down the single largest reason why I abandoned my Gmail. I receive countless people's credit applications, loan details, new credit card details, bills, etc, credit collections, etc. All because they have the same last name as me and opted to use a period in their email address. This is happening across multiple countries as well. Sadly, none of these people ever receive their important messages because I gave up trying ages ago. How they continue to explain this away as a feature is beyond me. Google is constantly pushing forward with various, and perhaps superficial, security/privacy oriented initiatives yet here's one of their core products offering up the most private details of others without zero care to fix it. SMH
  • compscistd 6y ago
    I don't know how this would happen under their policy. > Adding dots doesn't change your address, so dots aren't why you got someone else's mail. Instead, the sender probably mistyped or forgot the correct address. > For example, if someone meant to email john.43.smith@gmail.com but typed john.smith@gmail.com, the message went to you because you own johnsmith@gmail.com.
  • stingraycharles 6y ago
    This type of stuff happens all the time. I’m actually receiving all kinds of internal information from a large insurance company from India, supposedly because one of their employees is registered with a typo in the domain name, which is my domain. I can’t for the love of god make clear to these people that there must be a dozen laws this violates. I see insurance application, invoices, disputes, everything on at least a weekly basis. I have no idea what my legal position in this is. I tried reaching out to the senders, but I am afraid of reaching out to the C-levels directly because who knows how they respond. Bottom line, people make typos all the time, and it’s not just dots that cause this. People are just terrible at email and email is terrible for sensitive documents.
• headShrinker 6y ago
  I used to have a dot in my gmail address then I started receiving messages to my address without the dot. The messages were from people I didn't know to people I didn't know. I thought there was something wrong and I was receiving other peoples messages. And this is where it gets weird... I was. Just not because of the dot. My gmail handle is pretty short, 6 chars. First name last initial, pretty cool. I got it during the early in the first beta year, (gmail was beta for like 10 years.) However 10 years later I'm now receiving emails in german, parking tickets from cities I've never been, paid subscriptions, access to gmail and facebook accounts because people set my gmail handle as their recovery address. I can even unlock a guys car from the manufacturers web UI whom I've never met. The best/worst by far is the time the FBI reached out to me, which I thought was some bad phishing attempt and replied mildly taunting them. However, it was in fact a real FBI agent who wrote back noticeably annoyed at my flippant response. There was a vailed threat that if I don't take this seriously things would happen. A lump formed in my throat. I called them and for 5 minutes it was kind of scary. I found out a doctor had been using my email handle for oxytocin prescriptions and they were investigating this doctor... I explained that I had received other messages for this doctor and approximated his age and name, explained my short desirable email address, at which point the agent broke their stern professional tone and we shared a little chuckle.
• saeranv 6y ago
  Cool, so that means we all have infinite variations of our email addresses.
• Asooka 6y ago
  That's pretty useful for giving out to sites that believe you can't have a + in your email, but you still want to track who the address is shared with. Does anyone know if you can make different filters for differently dotted versions?
• dinkleberg 6y ago
  Glad to know I'm not alone in being a john.smith@gmail.com and receiving emails for johnsmith@gmail.com. For a while I was concerned there was some issue where there was an existing johnsmith@gmail.com before I created mine and gmail just fused them. But it seems more likely whoever this other johnsmith is, they just think they have this email.
• everyone 6y ago
  cool so johnsmith@gmailcom works? nice!
• gdrift 6y ago
  I was blocked from my gmail account for attempting to log in without the dot. My address is firstname.lastname@gmail. Had it for years. When I learned that dots don't matter I tried to log in without the dot and was immediately blocked for suspicious behavior. Luckily it wasn't used for anything important. Few months later the block was removed. Never tried to play with the dots again since.
• miguelmota 6y ago
  It's also an old trick that people do in order to create a lot of accounts on websites (typically for malicious reasons) without having to create many disposable email. They use a combination of periods and plus signs in the email label. On top of that they can use the alias googlemail.com instead of gmail.com to create more accounts on websites.
• microtherion 6y ago
  I have an uncommon last name, and picked an uncommon handle, so most of my accounts never get misaddressed e-mails. But when I was younger and more foolish, I opened a mail account with a flippant phrase as the handle, and apparently somebody used that phrase as a "fake" e-mail address when signing up for the Trump campaign mailing list. One thing I'm learning from that deluge of e-mails is that, no matter how little I think of GOP voters, I cannot manage to treat them with the utter contempt that the presidential family is treating them with.
• dylanz 6y ago
  I receive incorrect email daily because of this. Early adopter problem for early Gmail users. I could have had my first name at Gmail back in the day but I thought “what’s wrong with Hotmail!?”. Same thing for Twitter, but I still don’t use Twitter. I could have probably sold it for a pretty penny though. Hindsight!
• devendramistri 6y ago
  When I got out from college, i created my gmail account via a invitation link from a friend (In 2006, there were invitation based sign-up). I created gmail id without any dots in it and just firstnamelastname@gmail.com, Later I joined as software engineer in a company, I came to know that good email is firstname.lastname@company.bla format, so I wanted to have my gmail id as firstname.lastname@gmail.com But it wasn't available. I was so desperate to have it that I decided to email the person who owns it, so I emailed on the id (having dot in it). Guess What! I received my own email, requesting myself to handover the id. Then I did some tests to know if dot is making any sense or not. so tested like first.name.last.name etc. Found this link way back then. Great to know that someone else found it after so long :)
• znpy 6y ago
  I have been getting private data and private documents of people with my same name because of this moronic feature. And I can't trust Gmail anymore because of this.