> From the various reports, including by people aware of gmail's stance, gmail may have had a bug allowing it at some point. I think these are simply people wh

> From the various reports, including by people aware of gmail's stance, gmail may have had a bug allowing it at some point. I think these are simply people who cannot believe that someone might give out an email address they do not actually own, either because they are confused or because they make one up on the spot just to fill in a required form field. So when they receive messages intended for someone else but addressed to another variant of their own address, they treat that as proof that the intended recipient owns that variant. In reality, people giving out email addresses they do not own is extremely common. I see a lot of people swearing up and down that they have seen proof that such a Gmail bug exists. But whenever you dig into the details, it turns out that all they have actually seen is emails intended for someone else arriving in their inbox. There is never any direct evidence that two people were able to register two Gmail addresses that normalize to the same canonical address.