Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

*@gmail.com

xkcd.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 211 posts

Re: *@gmail.com

#91

Post by ludwik »

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.

The point is "ignoring dots" doesn't lead to "constantly getting e-mail for other people" (because there are no other people that own the "dotted" version of the email).

Re: *@gmail.com

#92

Post by bhandziuk »

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.

If people understood this feature they probably would also understand why they are in a reply-all storm and not need that feature.

Re: *@gmail.com

#93

Post by citizenkeen »

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.

But they don't.

You can write rules on f.oo to go a different path than fo.o.

Re: *@gmail.com

#94

Post by manojlds »

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.

Do you use gmail and have you used the . in email? Are you just assuming how it work?

Re: *@gmail.com

#95

Post by nmeofthestate »

adrianmsmith wrote: post #7
laurentlb wrote: post #4

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…

Bear in mind that since there are a lot of websites (hundreds at least), and you haven't signed up to all of them, you can end up getting emails from websites you didn't sign up for even, when you're not using Gmail. I doubt it makes this minor problem appreciably worse

Re: *@gmail.com

#96

Post by ludwik »

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.

I registered my Gmail account in September 2004 (so around 3 months after it was publicly introduced) and the ignore-ruled was already in place then. I'm pretty sure what you describe is not possible.

Re: *@gmail.com

#97

Post by TonyTrapp »

falcor84 wrote: post #55
TonyTrapp wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just one anecdata, but in my case, all of the unwanted signups I get on my gmail address are not due to dots - they are flat out because people input my email address exactly the same way as I would - without dots. I think it's more a side-effect of gmail being "the" global email namespace for millions of people, not because of anything their service itself is doing.

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

Re: *@gmail.com

#98

Post by donalhunt »

nmeofthestate wrote: post #86
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…

Same.

The most humerus conversation I got added to involved a local residential community dispute where everyone assumed my insistence of being removed from the thread was actually my namesake trying to avoid the conversation.

His wife finally stepped in to resolve the situation.

Re: *@gmail.com

#99

Post by sznio »

joshxyz wrote: post #53
jug wrote: 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?

Not trying to mislead existing users into creating new accounts.

It's really annoying that on some websites you have to open up multiple dropdowns to reach the login page, also passing five sign up buttons on the way there. It's even filled with dark patterns, with the sign up button blinking and screaming at you to click it every single time, while the login button is made smaller and grayed out. I remember GitHub pulling this shit some time ago. Once I truly couldn't find the login button and gave up, opting to guess the URL/find it in history.

What is even the purpose of that? Is it truly a scheme to get users to sign up multiple times for the same service so that the user number goes higher? That seems too dumb.

Re: *@gmail.com

#100

Post by ethbr1 »

nmeofthestate wrote: post #89
daigoba66 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Post reply on HN