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*@gmail.com

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Re: *@gmail.com

#81

Post by dredmorbius »

xigoi wrote: post #46
vvillena wrote: post #41

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?

You may be stunned and astounded to discover that This Actually Happens.

(Examples include both Gmail and other systems.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12025091>

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12027598>

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17284211>

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36756201>

Re: *@gmail.com

#82

Post by xigoi »

dredmorbius wrote: post #73
xigoi wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can't be, because Gmail obviously won't let you register an address that's already registered.

Will Gmail prevent you from entering such an address elsewhere, thinking either that it is yours, or that it is the email of some intended recipient other than the actual Gmail accountholder? Alternatively: will third-party systems consolidate such addresses under a single account, or treat them as different?

Will any e-mail service prevent you from entering an address that's not yours to another site?

Re: *@gmail.com

#83

Post by Aaargh20318 »

Taniwha wrote: post #21
juergbi wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't Facebook require users to verify the email address with a confirmation email? If so, the only Facebook spam you should be able to get would be such confirmation emails. Or what am I missing?

Oh I wish that were true, I've been receiving email for years for someone who signed up to facebook with my email address. It's a horrible pain, you can't contact facebook without a facebook account, and I can't create one because someone already has one with my email address.

Do a password recovery, log in and simply delete the account.

I had to do this once when someone signed up to FB with my email address. It actually was an eye opening experience as to how much data FB collects from everyone.

Now keep in mind that: 1) I don't have a FB account myself 2) This person signed up with my email address (which is @gmail.com), but their name is completely different from mine 3) They didn't even speak the same language, when I logged in to the new account the whole thing was in Swedish or something like it.

So nothing at all linking the account to me, except a misspelled e-mail address. When I logged in, FB was happy to suggest I friend a whole bunch of people I know IRL. Including people that do not know the e-mail address used. Absolutely crazy. How were they able to link me to these people when I was signed in to a complete stranger's account?

Re: *@gmail.com

#84

Post by daigoba66 »

InsomniacL wrote: post #77
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. That is not how it works, you own every combination of your email address with dots left of @ automatically. if you own foo@gmail.com, then nobody else can own f.oo@gmail.com because you own it, it's an alias of your email address esentially.

Isn’t that functionally the same as “ignore dots”?

Meaning they can just strip out the dots when matching email addresses: either on login/signup or mail routing.

Re: *@gmail.com

#86

Post by nmeofthestate »

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.

Genuinely confused - which other people? There are no other people with your Gmail address but added/removed '.' characters. What you're seeing is people sending emails to the wrong email address - nothing to do with presence or absence of '.' characters.

Allowing addresses to subtly differ based on '.' presence/absence would result in more wrongly addressed emails, hence the aliasing.

I've been getting wrong Gmail emails all the time for years because a woman in Saskatchewan keeps getting her email wrong when signing up to stuff online. Quite funny really but nothing to do with .'s

Re: *@gmail.com

#87

Post by chipsa »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #62
sethammons wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 annoyin…

Similarly, I configured my mail server to use the system "tag.user@domain". So you can't use the same heuristic as gmail, because if you try to do an untagged email, you likely just give the tag, which doesn't correspond to a user.

Re: *@gmail.com

#88

Post by dismalpedigree »

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.

Re: *@gmail.com

#89

Post by nmeofthestate »

daigoba66 wrote: post #84
InsomniacL wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That is not how it works, you own every combination of your email address with dots left of @ automatically. if you own foo@gmail.com, then nobody else can own f.oo@gmail.com because you own it, it's an alias of your email address esentially.

Isn’t that functionally the same as “ignore dots”? Meaning they can just strip out the dots when matching email addresses: either on login/signup or mail routing.

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.

Re: *@gmail.com

#90

Post by martin_a »

InsomniacL wrote: post #66
richardw wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.
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