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Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

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Re: Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

#291

Post by tjpnz »

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…

I share a name with a builder from Queensland and have been getting his email for years - loan applications, hardware receipts, updates about his rental properties, apprenticeship schemes - you name it. What's insane about it is how many people insisted they had the correct address when I used to follow up.

Re: Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

#292

Post by hnick »

kjhughes wrote: post #213

I think that companies' failure to verify their users' email addresses during signup is a serious problem that goes beyond any dot confusion. When John Smith signs up for an account using JohnSmith@gmail.com (or John.Smith@gmail.com), and the company trusts John Smith to have provided the email address accurately, three parties are affected: Both John Smiths and the company itself. Yes, verifying email address create…

Some of them also only allow you to unsubscribe or contact support through logging in to your account. Which I could easily do through a password reset but that's illegal so I'm not going to bother.

I'm still getting credit card statements from an Indian bank. I can confirm the PDF password is easily cracked :)

Re: Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

#293

Post by dylanz »

I receive incorrect email daily because of this. Early adopter problem for early Gmail users. I could have had my first name at Gmail back in the day but I thought “what’s wrong with Hotmail!?”. Same thing for Twitter, but I still don’t use Twitter. I could have probably sold it for a pretty penny though. Hindsight!

Re: Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

#294

Post by judge2020 »

jeffbee wrote: post #206
kevincox wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is fine if you want to try to block duplicate emails, but you should always continue to use the original. But yes, it has false positives and false negatives. I don't think I would call it "broken". But at the end of the day doing this kind of comparison probably raises more questions than it solves.

It's not even fine for that. If you assume that JayNesmith@ and JayneSmith@ are duplicates, you're eventually going to annoy someone.

Does MS Exchange or any other relatively big email server allow multiple emails with mixed case? As far as i'm aware all of the big consumer providers (Google, Yahoo, Outlook) don't allow it.

Re: Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

#295

Post by londons_explore »

martinflack wrote: post #283
liquidgecka wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I was an ... SRE ...... I ... caused a production outage I have nothing to add, except that you made me smile on a Friday afternoon.

Nearly all SRE's have caused an outage of some kind... The trick is to design your systems well enough that even when there is an outage few/no people notice...

Re: Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

#296

Post by boring_twenties »

treeman79 wrote: post #211
boring_twenties wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about this but wouldn't that be a felony?

Yes. 99.9% chance no one would care. But people do freak out over this stuff. Knew one guy that saw that a Bank got hacked on the news. Did an nslookup or similar to check the banks site. He was arrested the next day and expelled from college for hacking the bank. Eventually all got cleared up, but screwed up a year of his life

Yeah, I'd rather not take a 0.1% chance of losing my rights for life over some spam email.

Re: Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

#297

Post by boring_twenties »

laurent92 wrote: post #275
boring_twenties wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about this but wouldn't that be a felony?

Can you claim you thought it was your account? Then, to demonstrate you knew it wasn’t yours, they’d have to collect various proof, and this demonstration being erratic and risky, they’d probably not attempt a trial.

I can probably claim whatever I want, but given I've never even looked at a Lexus dealership in my life, I doubt I could pull it off.

Re: Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

#298

Post by boring_twenties »

rorykoehler wrote: post #217
boring_twenties wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unsubscribe, man, I'm jealous. Some dude 2,000 miles away from me has bought a Lexus and now I get regular emails about the status of his vehicle, receipts for all work done to it, and reminders of all maintenance not done to it. For a year and counting. Each email helpfully includes instructions for unsubscribing: First, you log into the Lexus app... I finally got fed up with it and reported them to abuse@.

Just create a filter to auto delete them

Perfectly reasonable solution but somehow just unsatisfying.

In the old days, when I ran my own mail server, I used to enjoy rejecting them with custom SMTP 550 messages.

Now I can't do that so I hard to resort to bothering the poor folks at abuse@.

In my defense, they have emailed me from 3 or so different domains/services, so I've had to set up a filter more than once.

Re: Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

#299

Post by liquidgecka »

tialaramex wrote: post #184
liquidgecka wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. =)

The XKCD cartoon isn't talking about a literal plus symbol. 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 created and removed several single letter emails as part of a test once, and I made several short names (mine, spam@, etc). The biggest problem was that too short would take the backend down because it received more mail than could be indexes at the time so too short or too common would get deleted to protect the system. As far as I know Randal still has his though. :-)

But yea your right about the plus I guess Ii didn't read it detailed enough.

Re: Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

#300

Post by liquidgecka »

martinflack wrote: post #283
liquidgecka wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I was an ... SRE ...... I ... caused a production outage I have nothing to add, except that you made me smile on a Friday afternoon.

Google war story: we used to get digital badges on our employee profiles to indicate useful things like ability to write c++ or python, or having worked on a specific project, etc. I got "porn cookie" for working on the safe search stuff.

Anyway, I designed a badge called "I broke Gmail" that would get applied to anybody that did exactly that. I intended a hint of shame but I got a wall of emails asking to get it with explanations of how each had broken the service at some point.

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