Live data from Hacker News

*@gmail.com

xkcd.com

121–130 of 211 posts

Re: *@gmail.com

#121
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is, but the key point is that this doesn't lead to people sending mail to the wrong address since nobody can sign up to "the wrong address" in the first place. There's one address allowed, aliased to all permutations.

It does lead to people sending mail to the wrong address, from personal experience since Gmail was in beta. I've gotten sensitive emails and account signups with different dots for years. But the cause of that appears to be user error -- people thinking they own email addresses that are not actually theirs.

That's the point I think, the dots aren't causing any issues here, some people just assume their account is f.m.lastname@gmail.com and many of them are too stubborn to accept that it's not.

They never had an email address with or without dots that's made up of the same letters as your email address. Their email address is probably very different (maybe they forgot to add a number, or a middle initial, or typed Gmail when they should've typed Outlook). The dots are just a stylistic choice.

Re: *@gmail.com

#122
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.

Oh, yikes: when did the + stop working for Apple support? That's going to bite me at some point. (And in general, yeah: I've had multiple cases over the years where the "+" only caused problems after signup. One of several reasons that I eventually stopped using those forms.)

And just to put it out there: "+" addresses aren't specifically a Gmail thing, they've been supported by most(?) mail servers for a very long time.

Re: *@gmail.com

#123
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a problem when using email to register into a different site. Services without email validation will happily accept those two addresses separately, because they don't adhere to Gmail's internal conventions. If the site then sends mail to its registered accounts, then the Gmail address will receive unwanted mail.

Why would you register with an e-mail address that's not yours in the first place?

In my case, a few years ago, it was a user who didn't understand the difference between Twitter and Gmail.

Re: *@gmail.com

#124
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.

Well now you gotta tell us the story.

Re: *@gmail.com

#125
post #63
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL this reminds me of a hilarious bug (but only in hindsight!) I had with Discord just three days ago! I tried to login to Discord. It detected a novel browser or location. Sure, this stuff can happen. It wanted to confirm that I was still me and asked me for my e-mail address. I gave it and it said "This e-mail address is already registered". What. Of course it is. It's me. Mine. The one I have registered with you.…

This isn't a bug. Instead of clicking the "login" button on discord's home page, you clicked the "Open discord in your browser" button. This, by default if you're not logged in, takes you to a create account flow. The prompt you entered your _username_ into was the "Pick a display name" prompt. If you enter, say, "user" it silently adds numbers to your displayname to make a new username ("user1234"), rather than redi…

You might be right but then why did I get in just fine the second time I opened Discord after these hoops? I clicked on the same button both times. That was about as surprising for me, that I was just suddenly logged in and fine again. On my old account. And the Reddit thread is full of people falling into this trap too?

Re: *@gmail.com

#126

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

I think the problem he has with the word is data is the plural(!) for singular datum. So one data is datum, two cactuses are cacti, and two datas is data. Maybe not always colloquially but technically. Hence anecdatum and anecdata.

Re: *@gmail.com

#128
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…

At amazon in 2010, someone sent an email to everyone on the "all" mailing list to ask if anyone had seen it. A reply-all storm ensued, and despite several people asking to stop hitting the reply-all button, it continued for several days.

The management had to chime in and sometimes threatened people with punishment if they continued participating to the reply-all storm.

If you ignored the conversation you may not have seen it, but most reply-all storm ended up with someone saying something the line of "we don't care about your wallet".

Anyway, asking people to stop hitting the reply-all button is far from being the latest reply-all on these kind of things...

Re: *@gmail.com

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you clarify how ignoring the dots is a problem?

One problem I've encountered is that usually sites won't allow you to register an account if the email address is already registered at that site. So if I register foo@gmail.com then someone else can't accidentally register foo@gmail.com. But they can register f.o.o@gmail.com just fine. So I mean at my Gmail I have all manner of different Facebook accounts with various misspelling of my email address notifying me of…

Facebook shouldn't be sending you those emails at all, to be honest, assuming you never clicked the verification button.

That said, clicking the "report spam" button should allow you to unsubscribe from such emails without dealing with logins or whatnot. Gmail supports certain unsubscribe headers that'll automate the process, which should make getting rid of Facebook's spam a lot easier.

Re: *@gmail.com

#130
post #63
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL this reminds me of a hilarious bug (but only in hindsight!) I had with Discord just three days ago! I tried to login to Discord. It detected a novel browser or location. Sure, this stuff can happen. It wanted to confirm that I was still me and asked me for my e-mail address. I gave it and it said "This e-mail address is already registered". What. Of course it is. It's me. Mine. The one I have registered with you.…

This isn't a bug. Instead of clicking the "login" button on discord's home page, you clicked the "Open discord in your browser" button. This, by default if you're not logged in, takes you to a create account flow. The prompt you entered your _username_ into was the "Pick a display name" prompt. If you enter, say, "user" it silently adds numbers to your displayname to make a new username ("user1234"), rather than redi…

I hate that prominent sign up, hidden sign in pattern so much. Is it simply that a tracking system "discovered" the sign in button isn't statistically used that often so someone concluded you don't really need it?
Post reply on HN