Yep, same here, since the beginning, I have a lot of people trying to email me at firstnamelastname instead of firstname.lastname and it's always badly addresse

Yep, same here, since the beginning, I have a lot of people trying to email me at firstnamelastname instead of firstname.lastname and it's always badly addressed email, especially as there's someone who uses firstnamelastnameinitial, which is kind of a nightmare. They've always had the "ignore the dot" semantics and it's sometimes even useful for testing, same as the plus-for-tagging. On the plus side I did manage to save a name-cousin's immigration application one time when it went to spam on my account, I though that was a pretty interesting experience. I also don't think google will let you actually register a new account without the dot, so the privacy leakage is much smaller than you might imagine.