It's always interesting when you get a glimpse into a foreign way of thinking about the world. It makes sense that someone for whom email has always been a proc

It's always interesting when you get a glimpse into a foreign way of thinking about the world. It makes sense that someone for whom email has always been a process of interacting with a website might not realize that the "to" line is really just a free-form text field, and that all apparent structure is being applied ad-hoc by the client. But are you even thinking about email as something which has a client, if you're using GMail? I can see how it would be reasonable to imagine that the big mystery machine which appears to control the whole process would have some master database of email addresses in it somewhere.