Hacker News Reader

Comment by elFarto | Hacker News Reader

I'm amazed how many people get their email address wrong. I have <firstname>.<lastname>@gmail.com, which is fine, and hardly gets any mail meant for someone else. <firstletter><lastname>@gmail.com however, is basically unusable. Funny thing is, the latter was the one I created first, but I forgot the password so had to create the other. I managed to recover it later and I'm glad I have the former.

View on HN

I have a <firstletter><lastname>@gmail.com and I get everything from online shopping receipts to legal notices. You'd be amazed at just how uninterested a law firm is in knowing they just sent a bunch of legal correspondence to someone who isn't their client.

Sort of off topic, but did you know that the '.' gets ignored in gmail addresses, you can remove it or add extras and you will still get the email.

And you can also interchange `gmail` and `googlemail`, append `+anything` to alias.

It's a slippery slope though - forget worrying about remembering or managing passwords, you have to deal with variations of an email address too.

Further, email clients will reply from whatever address you used to setup the client. Maybe you can add aliases, but that will be time-consuming, and even where supported there's usually a single-digit limit. This can cause real headaches - e.g. "reply with `UNSUBSCRIBE` in the subject line to be removed from this list" and being unable to reply from the right email address.

This is true in general, but some of the very early Gmail addresses do differentiate based on the '.'

For instance, my very early-adopter Gmail address has a '.' in the address but it is an entirely different account from the one without. If you send mail to the one without the '.' I do not receive it.

God I love edge cases / grandfathering

I have <lastname>@gmail.com because I'm an early adopter (TM). My mailbox is almost unusable.

I've got my nick doubled as gmail account. Guess how many stray mails in moonspeak I get on a regular basis from China, Brazil and other weirdo locales?

I have a <firstletter><lastname>, my lastname is very uncommon but it turns out that someone in another country has the same first name and last name and you can get my email by googling my name. So, I have received few emails for him and kindly replied that I wasn't him.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com