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Comment by kposehn | Hacker News Reader

Wow, that should not have happened. Can you let me know the name of the recruiter? You can email me at keith [dot] posehn [at] gmail

Sorry you had a bad experience and I'm bummed we lost you :(

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It kind of sounds like you're from Uber, but you're not giving an @uber.com address?

A quick google of the name and you can see he is; however I agree: anyone could have that email address. If he's legit from Uber and wants correspondence about an Uber interaction he should be listing his @uber.com address.

I tend to not give out my Uber email as I get a ton of solicitations every day. Forum/web email scraping is still very much a real thing unfortunately.

> keith [dot] posehn [at] gmail

Off-topic side question - is web robots scraping forums for parseable email addresses still a thing? I'm pretty free with my gmail address, and I haven't had a problem with spam making it to my inbox, but maybe I'm an edge case...

I put a unique email address in my hn profile at one point and got spam sent to it after a few months

I imagine it's still a thing, but spam filters have solved most of the problem.

Large-scale spam is pretty well filtered these days. But smaller-scale (especially B2B) cold inquiries to curated lists of interested parties are still very much a thing. And sites like https://hunter.io/ absolutely do use publicly available search results (including forums) to find which of many permutations might be someone's email address. They may not be sophisticated enough yet to use [dot] as part of those permutations, but it's only a matter of time.

François from Hunter here.

Hunter does indeed search the entire public web for professional email addresses, following search engines specifications like robots.txt.

However, we do not try to reverse obfuscations as it is a clear sign the owner doesn't want the email address to be collected by automatic means. So even basic obfuscations like [dot] are enough to prevent the collection.

We also let the email addresses owners modify or delete the data we index about them: https://hunter.io/claim.

I doubt there’s an email scraper that hasn’t added logic to replace [at] with @ etc. - so most of these obfuscations are absolutely useless too.

I had my unobfuscated email in my HN profile for no more than 2 weeks, and received a couple of cold mails in turn (to this date, actually).

Sadly yes - for major company emails at least.

Just an aside, you can ignore the dot on your email, or add as many as you like. Google ignores periods on email addresses. Just google it... :D

Another fun feature with Gmail is that you can add arbitrary text to the end of your email addresses.

This can be helpful if you're interested in tracking the origins of where your received emails come from. For instance, if you sign up your address at a website and start recieving sketchy emails with a destination for myemail+thatwebsite[at]gmail, you can easily find out where the leakage occurred.

Aren’t both of those things relatively standard for email in general

Plus-based subaddresses are relatively common (sendmail supports them, Sieve has RFC 5233, etc), but dot-insensitivity is/was unique to gmail as far as I'm aware.

Unless the spammer knows about this too and trims any +suffixes from the addresses.

FastMail thought of this and lets you use subdomains instead. So user@tag.domain gets delivered to your mailbox as user+tag@domain.

Hem it's not a GMail specific feature but a common one (sub-addressing/plus addressing, RFC 5233) that skip inbox and drop messages in the +$name/tag dir/label...

The GMail specific feature is adding dots as you want in your mail localpart so (foobar, f.oo.bar, f.o.o.b.a.r etc @gmail are the very same mailbox).

Ok, that I did not know. Thanks!

Ahem. There's someone with whom I apparently share both first name, last name and, against our will, the gmail email address.

So apparently my email address is lastname.firstname@gmail.com (firstname.lastname@gmail.com was already taken) and this guy has lastnamefirstname@gmail.com.

How cool that GMail ignores dots in the middle, right ?

Sometimes I wonder if he is receiving my emails, because I often receive his emails. I tried and forwarded him his email, GMail was stupid enough to deliver them back to my inbox.

The "ignore the dots in the middle" is truly a major google brain fart.

This is to say... Like, Just, be aware of this.

That is not correct, likely this other person incorrectly gave out your email accidentally.

Indeed this must be the case. I share the same given and family name with several folks in the US and I get their mistaken emails all the time.

Wait, what ? How could that not have triggered a test somewhere at Google ? Did they just implement the dot thing after they already created both addresses ?

I'm going to chime in here since everyone downvoted the OP. My guess is he got the Gmail account early. This was a known bug early with Gmail. They fixed the signups, but it seems there were some issues that continued if you had already gotten an email address that collided prior to the"fix".

I created an account for my daughter that had this issue and it was really messed up; we can see emails sent and received by another person which included a bunch of personal information; job application conversations, flight details, etc...

We ended up just switching our daughter to a new address, but if we had a more malicious nature; this is a big security issue.

Indeed, I created my account when it was invite-based. That must be like more than ten years ago.

Thanks you for understanding.

I thought the dots didn’t make a difference for gmail

You should be able to receive emails at last.nam.e.fir.stn.ame@gmail.com too

Try it

I have a similar email address, and I get emails for three or four people with the same name as me. I get wedding invitations, tax documents, job application responses, even a grad school application response once!

I can only assume there are small differences in the actual addresses and the senders are careless when typing in the "to" field.

Downvoting this comment, wich usually pops up whenever somebody talks about the dots in hn, won't make the problem disappear. I too receive emails for someone who created an account with my namesurname but with a dot.

That's not possible. As has already been discussed in this thread, you cannot create another email that is the same but with dots. Google will consider it a duplicate and tell you the address is already taken.

Apparently there is an individual that has a similar name to me. I recently received an email involving a Swiss bank transfer of 750 million dollars.

Hei, it's me, your friendly and personal Nigerian prince!

No, you're just experiencing this: https://xkcd.com/1279/

Yep - I just default to it generally, but I know I can just get rid of it. Force of habit :P

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