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Comment by peter303 | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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

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)...

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