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I have this problem too - only, it happens a LOT. I've had people use my Gmail address but without the "." to sign up (or try to) for Playstation accounts, Apple accounts, Paypal, Skype, Bank accounts, plus it's pretty common that I receive wills and other sensitive legal documents, property deals, you name it. The legal docs etc are likely due to other people mishearing/mistyping someone's email which I can understand, but I'm constantly baffled by how often people must type in their OWN email address incorrectly for important situations too.

Often I can just ignore the signup confirmation emails and it doesn't go any further, but it's surprising how often there is no confirmation link sent out and the account gets opened without verification of the email address. At that point, it can be incredibly difficult to get the problem rectified. Most companies don't seem to have any procedure in place to deal with this situation - Many online companies only have an easy way to contact them if you are one of their customers, so I often have to resort to resetting that user's password to get into their account and use the company's contact form to try and get things straightened out from there. Sometimes even that isn't possible, e.g. because 2FA prevents me from resetting the password, so about the best I can do is unsubscribe from their marketing emails and leave the account active.

I have a very similar problem as this, but often it's in another language, German or Spanish usually, to boot.

The access I have to mess with other peoples' lives, if I so chose, is amazing.

I have this same issue with one of my junk email addresses. It's pretty short, it's a famous person's last name (I was a fan), but it's not a very common last name. I've received all kinds of stuff, from many people, but one lady in particular. I only recently noticed this and when checking, I found out that this had been going on since 2008. She's used my email for: car service appointments, plane tickets, Walmart orders, forwards from her work email, turbo tax, customer support, change.org, hotel reservations, etc. Pretty much every aspect of her life has ended up in that mailbox.

I'm truly happy for her that I'm not a malicious person and when I figured it out I sent her a message. I hope she manages to stop using my email for stuff.

It does make a case for not using common user names. I used to always try to use my first name in the early days of the Internet, but it was almost always taken.

The one time I got it was with one of the Maxis online accounts and for the next couple of years I seemed to get a bunch of password reset requests from people who thought it was their account.

While there's something to be said for not using the same user name across different systems using a very common name is not a mistake I'm going to make again.

gmail has this weird bug that if I am XY@gmail.com, I also get email from X.Y@gmail.com.

Is that just for you? Or in general for anyone?

Gmail ignores periods in emails. It also ignores everything after the +.

So if your email is bob@gmail.com you can also use:

b.ob@gmail.com, b.o.b@gmail.com, bob+alice@gmail.com,

You can use the second one to do filtering. I.e. use a different +{filter} for bills, entertainment etc.

bob+bills@gmail.com for bills. bob+spam@gmail.com for sites you know will spam you etc.

then setup mail rules to filter based on the +

What if my email IS a.bob.mail@gmail.com, if someone registers abobmail@gmail.com are they getting my emails?

no, Gmail does check for that during registration. But you could use those two different email addresses to create two separate accounts somewhere else.

There's a slight chance the gmail developers would have thought of that scenario.

I knew about the + sign, but not about the period. Thanks for that - will come in handy!

For everyone, that's on purpose. Also xy+anything@gmail.com will go to xy@gmail.com inbox (with anything label added)...

It's not a bug. It's a feature :)

"If someone accidentally adds dots to your address when emailing you, you'll still get that email. For example, if your email is johnsmith@gmail.com, you own all dotted versions of your address"

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150?hl=en#

That would be a great feature if you could tell gmail what +something suffixes you've used and it blocked all mail to other suffixes and the address without the suffix. As it is, spammers can just strip off the +something part, or change it to +somethingelse, to cover their tracks. I know this is gmail specific - for other providers they'd have to keep +something suffix in case it really goes to a different inbox - but gmail is so big that spammers can afford to make a special case for them.

Gmail has a filter feature, can't you use it for that?

yes, but the point is that spammers can easily modify that part of the address to make the filter stop working.

Doesn't Gmail support rules that apply when no other did? That could be used to filter out all emails to addresses that are in use we while deleting all others.

It’s not a bug, it’s a feature: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150?hl=en

This is a feature not a bug[0].

You can also add a plus sign with your own string after the username, useful for giving to websites you don't fully trust.

e.g. user.name+facebook@gmail.com

Gmail will still send it to user.name@ and you can track and filter the messages sent to that address.

[0] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150

Absolutely this, it’s a great feature. When required to give an email I add a prefix so that it’s easy to track and block.

How did you log into it? By changing the password?