Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

support.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 314 posts

Re: Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

#151

Post by beowulfey »

Santosh83 wrote: post #6

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 withou…

Why not filter? If you know you always use the dot, filter without the dot. It works for me when I tried to set it up. Can even blacklist certain senders specifically so that if there are a few out there you made without the dot you will still get them.

Re: Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

#152

Post by boring_twenties »

RandomBacon wrote: post #48
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've encountered the same problem. One day I'm going to stop being polite and cancel the Hotel Reservations, Conference Invites, and other shit that this guy keeps signing up for using my email address. Maybe that will get him to finally pay attention.

I imagine then you've probably gotten receipts/confirmations with the person's phone number. Have you tried calling him and letting him know?

Yeah that's not going to help. I've got a guy using my email address for close to a decade. When it started, he was a high school student ordering lacrosse equipment. More recently he was buying a house -- I received the contract.

If my email is foobar@gmail.com, his is foobar7@gmail.com.

You'd think 10 years would be enough time to learn the difference, but nope.

Re: Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

#153

Post by blindm »

acruns wrote: post #127
blindm wrote: post #115

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!

You can also use @googlemail.com domain name instead of @gmail.com to double the number of email addresses.

Yes, you could do even more shenanigans registering with the following:

    john.doe+uniquestring@gmail.com
    j.ohndoe+uniquestring@gmail.com
    jo.hndoe+uniquestring@gmail.com
    joh.ndoe+uniquestring@gmail.com
    johnd.oe+uniquestring@gmail.com
    johndo.e+uniquestring@gmail.com

    john.doe+uniquestring@@googlemail.com
    j.ohndoe+uniquestring@@googlemail.com
    jo.hndoe+uniquestring@@googlemail.com
    joh.ndoe+uniquestring@@googlemail.com
    johnd.oe+uniquestring@@googlemail.com
    johndo.e+uniquestring@@googlemail.com

Re: Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

#154

Post by dotBen »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #99
eli wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d rather not commit a federal computer crime thanks

They provided false credentials. The account is yours. I did this once when someone created a Facebook account using my address. I let it go for a year and then did a password reset and deletion. At the time there was no requirement for email verification so the account was fully functional. Again, this is Facebook's responsibility to verify new accounts. A confirmation email link is last century's technology. Moreov…

They provided false credentials. The account is yours.

IANAL but I don't think it works like that. Ownership is not the same as control.

Re: Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

#155

Post by blindm »

har33sh wrote: post #118
blindm wrote: post #115

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!

You can also add multiple dots :)

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?

Re: Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

#156

Post by eli »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #99
eli wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d rather not commit a federal computer crime thanks

They provided false credentials. The account is yours. I did this once when someone created a Facebook account using my address. I let it go for a year and then did a password reset and deletion. At the time there was no requirement for email verification so the account was fully functional. Again, this is Facebook's responsibility to verify new accounts. A confirmation email link is last century's technology. Moreov…

I don't think this analysis is legally or ethically correct and I certainly would not want to have to test it against the CFAA in court.

Re: Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

#157

Post by kevincox »

Spivak wrote: post #78
jeffbee wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't the theory. There are almost no rules for the local part of an email address and you must not attempt to "validate" them. Whether a '+' terminates the user name or means nothing is entirely up to the domain operator.

The exception being when you know that the domain operator supports RFC5233 then you're allowed to be aware of subaddresses.

That does this RFC even say? I read it twice and it seems to say "Some mail servers may use the part of an email after any character as a subaddress which doesn't affect which inbox a message is delivered to."

It seems to only talk about the receiving server and gives no way for the sending server to do anything useful as it doesn't specify the character to use if the receiver implements it at all.

I think this is good, I would like to not have senders try to guess anything about the structure of my email, but it makes me wonder what the point of having the RFC at all is.

Re: Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

#158

Post by phasetransition »

searchableguy wrote: post #65
bitbang wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same exact issue. Especially with people from Africa for some reason. I get a lot of stuff from 3 people from Kenya, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. Most everything there is managed by phone, and they just use my email as a throw-away address. The guy in South Africa has a collections agency after him. The guy in Kenya likes to order food delivery quite a bit. I occasionally change his order to extra spicy. The guy in Zi…

I don't receive any junk mails anymore after switching to my custom domain.

I, too, am 95% better after switching away from first.last@gmail.com to something@firstlast.com and using g-suite on that domain for the last decade or so.

I gave up on Gmail for all the same reasons as the stories in this thread.

Re: Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

#159

Post by fanf2 »

amingilani wrote: post #144
justusthane wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s weird, but that’s been my experience too. I switched off Gmail (where I got tons of spam, although most properly caught by the spam filter) several years ago, and have received fewer than 200 spam emails in total since switching. I know this because my new host won’t allow the personalized spam filter to be enabled until you’ve received 200 spam. I’m not at all careful to keep my email address hidden on the inte…

Eventually you start getting a bunch of spam. I feel most of mine originated from GitHub and data-leaks. Tip: configure a catch-all to your email address, and use custom email addresses for every website. I love having e.g. news.ycombinator.com@gilani.me and being able to filter out bad email addresses whenever they become tiresome. I've also configured Mailgun on the domain (not what it was intended for but ¯\_(ツ)_/…

Setting up catch-all email addresses is a recipe to get absolutely inundated with spam.
Post reply on HN