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*@gmail.com

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Re: *@gmail.com

#111

Post by InsomniacL »

martin_a wrote: post #90
InsomniacL wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example please? How dose ignoring dots cause you to receive other peoples mail?

johndoe@gmail.com and john.doe@gmail.com are obviously two different addresses. At least for me. I don't see why the first one should receive mails from the second one.

They are two different addresses, think of the second as an alias to the first. Google creates an alias for every possible combination of dotted email address to your primary.

If you don't want to use the feature, you don't have to. Lots of people find it extremely useful.

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150?hl=en#zippy=%...

> if your email is johnsmith@gmail.com, you own all dotted versions of your address

> 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.

> Your account is still private and secure. Emails sent to any dotted version of your address will only go to you.

Re: *@gmail.com

#112

Post by Tobu »

jraph wrote: post #71
Tobu wrote: post #16

https://xkcd.com/2822/ -> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2822 Any other fun easter eggs in the XKCD counter? - https://xkcd.com/404/ 404s (obviously) - https://xkcd.com/1337/ is about hacking

I can only imagine the code that handles the previous and next buttons and the counter, with all the exceptions there probably are. the next of 403 is correctly 405, which correctly has 403 as its previous.

404 is handled exceptionally inside the sequence, and for a while it was double-exceptionally possible to land on it through the random button:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190328010454/https://plus.goog... (via explainkcd)

Re: *@gmail.com

#113

Post by sokoloff »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #54
Fnoord wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because its not according to RFCs and how everyone else has implemented it.

There is no RFC about how the local-part is interpreted: even the gmail +tag syntax is an extension some servers implement and some don't. The only way to accurately test equality of email addresses is to send an email to them.

Even that only tells you something about equality/equivalency (or more precisely, the deliverability) at this moment. I have a family mail server that we periodically update mail list and forwarding rules. You could test for deliverability today and tomorrow the situation could change.

Re: *@gmail.com

#114

Post by karlkatzke »

mabbo wrote: post #49

"If everyone would just stop replying, this would end! Why are you all still hitting reply all?!" -latest reply all on every reply-all storm. In my early days at Amazon, around 2012-2015, this would happen frequently enough [0]. I pretty quickly learned the best thing to do was to ignore the conversation and never think about it again rather than try to 'help'. [0] - too many new products and orgs set up new mailing…

I’m apparently still known for my snark during a reply-all storm at TAMU on an internal mailing list, 15 years ago.

Re: *@gmail.com

#115

Post by [deleted] »

TonyTrapp wrote: post #97
falcor84 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to nitpick, but I believe that "anecdata" is strictly plural and as such "one anecdata" is grammatically incorrect. It should probably be just "one anecdote", but if you want to emphasize the "data" aspect, I'd go with "one point of anecdata" or more concisely - "one anecdatum". Somewhat surprisingly to me, "anecdatum" has apparently never yet appeared in print [0], and I'm happy for the two of us to share cred…

Anecdata is a humorous term for "anecdotal evidence", i.e. it is not real "data". https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anecdata#Noun

[deleted]

Re: *@gmail.com

#116

Post by causi »

rcarmo wrote: post #3

This is a great reminder that Gmail ignores dots on the left side of the @ symbol, which means I am constantly getting e-mail for other people. The “+” tagging was a great idea, but the fact that incorrect address matching has become a “feature” (and not fixed over decades) plus constant spates of spam has made me believe there’s nobody left at the helm who actually understands e-mail. I’ve kept my Gmail addresses fo…

This is a great reminder that Gmail ignores dots on the left side of the @ symbol, which means I am constantly getting e-mail for other people.

Which can create problems with services who don't consider them the same. A decade or so ago I had an awful time trying to sort out two of my Xbox Live accounts that only varied by the dot, and couldn't figure out why I was still being charged when my account page said it was canceled.

Re: *@gmail.com

#117

Post by GuB-42 »

jraph wrote: post #61
mabbo wrote: post #49

"If everyone would just stop replying, this would end! Why are you all still hitting reply all?!" -latest reply all on every reply-all storm. In my early days at Amazon, around 2012-2015, this would happen frequently enough [0]. I pretty quickly learned the best thing to do was to ignore the conversation and never think about it again rather than try to 'help'. [0] - too many new products and orgs set up new mailing…

Never really happened to me, but Thunderbird has a pretty good feature for this case: "Ignore message thread". I'm sure other mail clients have this feature as well. If someone is bothered by such a thread, it's really easy to avoid.

It happened to me in a large company I worked with. Someone, probably an admin sent an email to the entire company, literally tens of thousands of people in the "To:" field. Of course, a few of them replied-all, then others replied to tell people to stop replying, etc... The server couldn't follow and mail couldn't be delivered fast enough, prompting even more replies. Email unrelated to the incident took 30 minutes to come through. Admins had to intervene, and the servers were down for about 4 hours, everything related to the incident was deleted server-side, and probably blacklisted too. The client couldn't do much, we didn't even get that many emails (a few dozens at most) since the server couldn't deliver them.

It was a very expensive email for sure.

Re: *@gmail.com

#118

Post by remus »

johnwalkr wrote: post #107
rcarmo wrote: post #3

This is a great reminder that Gmail ignores dots on the left side of the @ symbol, which means I am constantly getting e-mail for other people. The “+” tagging was a great idea, but the fact that incorrect address matching has become a “feature” (and not fixed over decades) plus constant spates of spam has made me believe there’s nobody left at the helm who actually understands e-mail. I’ve kept my Gmail addresses fo…

The “+” aspect mostly works great but has some weird edge cases when other companies don’t accept them. For example, I have a few apple ids using this feature, from moving to different countries. Apple no longer allows new accounts using “+”. My existing accounts work for iCloud, app, store etc but they do not work for logging into Apple support.

> The “+” aspect mostly works great but has some weird edge cases when other companies don’t accept them.

I wish it was just edge cases! I've bumped into so many services that can't handle "+" in email addresses, some seem to be on purpose (presumably to prevent signing up multiple accounts to the same address) but others are just old school bugs. My fav is services that send the email address to an API including the email address as a URL parameter, but forget to escape the email address so the + gets butchered in the process.

Re: *@gmail.com

#119

Post by deelly »

dismalpedigree wrote: post #88
InsomniacL wrote: post #75

I've realized a lot of people don't understand how the gmail dot feature works and blame it for all their problems. If you own foo@gmail.com, you also own every combination of it using dots left of the @. for example: f.oo@gmail.com fo.o@gmail.com Nobody else can register these addresses because they're all owned by foo@gmail.com automatically.

I don’t think this was always the case. I had two separate accounts around 2007ish. Separate passwords for each. . @gmail.com and @gmail.com.

That's pretty interesting, I just tried it with my aaaaaa@gmail (wrong letters) account.

I sent email to aaaaa.a@gmail and to aaa.aaa@gmail and receive both.

Re: *@gmail.com

#120

Post by Izkata »

sph wrote: post #51
dredmorbius wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To borrow an example from Internet domain names, consider: experts.exchang@gmail.com expert.sexchange@gmail.com Those addresses would be identical by Gmail's parsing conventions.

What happened to Expert Sexchange btw? Did they rebrand? Got bought by Stack Overflow?

They got a new domain name: experts-exchange.com

For a while it redirected, I guess they let it expire at some point.

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