What Julien laments is strange to many people. I found this behavior unexpected and hackish when I first heard about it. Now, after thinking about some of the i

What Julien laments is strange to many people. I found this behavior unexpected and hackish when I first heard about it. Now, after thinking about some of the implications for users and other applications, I'm not sure I have a firm opinion about it. Yes, it is a pain for third-party apps doing logins or password recovery. That said, it would be possible handle gmail addresses as a special case, which I admit is annoying from a software developer perspective. But we build tools, supposedly, to please customers, right? What do the customers want? From a user perspective, what Google is doing may be best. It is, after all, consistent with Postel's law / the robustness principle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle