181–190 of 314 posts
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…
There is also the alias of googlemail.com on the domain level... Always a cause of big headaches. johnsmith@gmail.com john.smith@gmail.com johnsm.ith+foobar@gmail.com j.oh.nsmith@googlemail.com all are pointing to the same logical email address.
The email you see in my profile is backed by a Gmail account, but I doubt you would know that if I didn't tell you. Hopefully I haven't made your headache worse ;)
Not only do dots not matter, you can suffix "+ " to your user name before the "@gmail.com" and it will still come to your email address. I actually love this "+" feature and use it a lot .. like send an email to "+bookmark@gmail.com" to bookmark a link, or register with "+nospam" and setup a filter for that address if anyone sends me email on that. This is supported by icloud and fastmail too.
Also a good check if the site has some sloppy implementation. More than once have I seen that my "+" email was not accepted because of invalid characters. I take this as a sign to not trust the site's security too.
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There's an xkcd for everything. Sure, that's probably my email address. https://xkcd.com/1279/
Annoyingly that is different, everything after the + is _ignored_ so only one person can have + @gmail.com. Other people I am guessing use first.lastname and that is where the confusion is. =)
If you took it literally that would imply the actual email address is a single letter @gmail.com and although some ex-SRE people and others at Google have said there were ways to get short addresses for employees, nobody has suggested a single letter would be available even for them. For normal users the minimum was six characters.
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…
Like they're signing up for something and put in "santosh83@gmail.com" and think "My name is Santosh and I was born in '83. Google obviously knows this and will send me this email!" ????????
This has only recently been a problem for me. There is a nice gentleman with my same name who picked up the gmail address without the dot. He lives in Arizona. Has a library membership. Plays in a softball league. I am not sure how much of my email he gets. I haven't set up a filter yet but I will eventually. I like seeing what my doppelganger is up to some times.
What does often happen is that people FORGET what their actual email address is when they hand it out to other people or write it down on forms. Or their friends or family mis-remember it. Your doppleganger may have actually been issued the address johnny.smith, or smith.johnny, but just forgets.
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You can filter your gmail based on the TO field (so anything without the dot goes to spam) if you like. I've done the same thing myself intentionally: I give the dot-less version to sites/companies where I need to receive an email or two (account confirmation etc). Then I manually grab them from spam and then forget the whole thing knowing I'll never see the other crap they send me. Hope that helps, as someone with a…
You can also append “+whatever” to the username part of your gmail address and filter it that way. E.g. johndoe+mailinglist@gmail.com Unfortunately some services won’t accept that as a valid address.
> Your Gmail address is unique. If anyone tries to create a Gmail account with a dotted version of your username, they'll get an error saying the username is already taken. Well then I'd like to know how someone keeps signing up for services with my address, even though I never click any confirmation links. The email used for signing up specifically differs from mine by a dot. (Though I don't think I'll complain to G…
Part of the reason is that Facebook verifies you're the owner of the email if you say "someone else has my email" by sending you an email which you have to reply to. But Google will reply to all of them with the canonical sign-up so mine has my.name@gmail.com that the reply goes out with, which doesn't match so I'm stuck marking all Facebook notifications as spam.