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Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

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261–270 of 314 posts

Re: Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

#262
That's pretty useful for giving out to sites that believe you can't have a + in your email, but you still want to track who the address is shared with. Does anyone know if you can make different filters for differently dotted versions?

Re: Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I use this all the time, everywhere I can.

The worst example of "we know what are valid email addresses better than anyone" case was when adidas.com decided that they'd redesign their registration flow and in the process disabled logins with "invalid" email addresses when they previously had accepted registrations and logins with email addresses tagged with + for years. That was genius.

Re: Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

#264
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a common last name and my email is my first initial and my last name. I get so much misdirected mail that I don’t even try to help these people. I hope John gets to his zoom interview for Deputy Chief of Police later today, because I’m not going to tell him about it.

Happens to me all the time, because my name is fairly common. Weird that Google wont "fix" that.

Out of curiosity, what would a "fix" look like?

Re: Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

#265
Glad to know I'm not alone in being a john.smith@gmail.com and receiving emails for johnsmith@gmail.com. For a while I was concerned there was some issue where there was an existing johnsmith@gmail.com before I created mine and gmail just fused them. But it seems more likely whoever this other johnsmith is, they just think they have this email.

Re: Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I own a 5 character common first and last name @gmail.com address Were you a Google employee? Or did you mean something other than how I read this, that your first and last name combined are 5 characters? Because I believe 5-character usernames are not permitted for gmail addresses. I tried to confirm this and provide a link, but all of support.google.com appears to be non-responsive right now. When it stars workin…

I was an early Gmail SRE so I was able to circumvent the restrictions. It was a bad idea it turns out. For a project I also created "spam@gmail.com" and caused a production outage due to the volume of mail it got forwarded. =) But yes your right, 6 characters is the minimum of "open" gmail accounts. I know of at least a dozen 2 character accounts created by insiders though.

that's a fantastic outage :)

Re: Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

#268
I was blocked from my gmail account for attempting to log in without the dot. My address is firstname.lastname@gmail. Had it for years. When I learned that dots don't matter I tried to log in without the dot and was immediately blocked for suspicious behavior. Luckily it wasn't used for anything important. Few months later the block was removed. Never tried to play with the dots again since.

Re: Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

almost positive 5 + 5 > 6

nono.. its a single word that is common as a first and last name. There are a BUNCH of cases where its applicable! =) But yea, 5 characters. I was an early gmail SRE so I was able to circumvent the restrictions. =)

Was it ?

Re: Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

#270
It's also an old trick that people do in order to create a lot of accounts on websites (typically for malicious reasons) without having to create many disposable email. They use a combination of periods and plus signs in the email label. On top of that they can use the alias googlemail.com instead of gmail.com to create more accounts on websites.
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