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*@gmail.com

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Re: *@gmail.com

#61
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.

Re: *@gmail.com

#62
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

imagine that you have an address name.surname@gmail.com imagine that someone else has an address namesurname@gmail.com this is very similar case to my mom's one. she constantly gets emails meant for someone else - including PII - because she has no dot in email, but the other party has a dot. I know for sure that her's account is quite old one.

Not for gmail though; gmail ignores those dots. But some.email@notgmail.com is normally a different inbox if the local part drops the dot.

> Not for gmail though; gmail ignores those dots. But some.email@notgmail.com is normally a different inbox if the local part drops the dot.

My own mail server is configured to use a different character besides the `+` for tags and its notion of "same account" is defined by a mysql query. There's no way to know the interpretation of the local part in advance: you can apply various heuristics if you don't mind annoying people; or you can accept the email and verify it by sending an email.

Re: *@gmail.com

#63
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 redirecting you to the login page or prompting you about it (like most other sites do).

At the end of the flow is a "Finish signing up", "claim your account" prompt (which really is the end of the "create a new account" flow, the ephemeral account without an email you're using there is in a partially signed up state).

This is the box where you were entering your email, getting a conflict, and ended up using a new email to create a totally new account.

I know people who use hacker news are on-average much less tech savvy than the average discord user, so I can get why you missed the login button on the home page and instead went through the "create account flow", but everything that happened is "working as intended" rather than a "bug".

I do agree the flow there is pretty confusing. They've managed to make the new user signup flow so optimized you didn't even realize you were doing it.

Still, by the time it was telling you your email was already registered, you really should have slowed down and noticed it was telling you you were creating a new account rather than using a new email address for some reason.

Re: *@gmail.com

#64
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…

• The story of Bedlam3: https://rodneymbliss.com/2013/10/17/i-survived-bedlam3/>

• Ornk! https://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/on-sea-lions>

Re: *@gmail.com

#65
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…

Drives me insane. And so many people and systems auto adjust addresses, produce almost mine, and then gmail delivers the random output. I once set up a google group to forward mail to. I’d pay to block the “full stop ignore” feature.

[deleted]

Re: *@gmail.com

#66
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…

Drives me insane. And so many people and systems auto adjust addresses, produce almost mine, and then gmail delivers the random output. I once set up a google group to forward mail to. I’d pay to block the “full stop ignore” feature.

Can you give an example please?

How dose ignoring dots cause you to receive other peoples mail?

Re: *@gmail.com

#68
Filter: Subject contains "new friends"

Action: Play sound [if working in office], Forward to "[initial sender]", Mark as read, Move to trash

Re: *@gmail.com

#70
post #53
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.…

what would be the best fix for this? when checking for dupes, ignore dots on all leftside of all emails?

What actually happened here is that the parent commenter, instead of clicking "login", entered their username into a "enter a display name" prompt on the home page, which registers a new account using the string you entered as a _display name_, and generates a random username.

The parent poster then did not realize they had created a new account and, even when it told them their email address was registered to a different account, somehow didn't realize they should go click login instead.

I think the easiest way for discord to make this a not-confusing experience for people who aren't tech savvy enough to click "login" to login, is to make it so the signup flow is a normal explicit "Enter email, enter display name, enter username" prompt, not a flow where they silently create a username if you _just_ enter a displayname.

The reason this would help is because forcing the user to enter a username early on lets you display a "Would you like to login instead?" message if the username conflicts.

Having the user enter a non-unique displayname, and silently creating a random unique username, means the signup flow no longer has the ability to say "Are you sure you don't want to login?"

Of course, discord mostly targets relatively tech-savvy users, not the average hacker-news-user, so it probably isn't that big a deal for their main demographic.

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