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Comment by amf12 | Hacker News Reader

You can also use this with a "." (email.spam@gmail.com) in Gmail.

Periods are ignored in gmail and anything after a + is also ignored, so all of these will go to the same mailbox:

   johndoe@gmail.com
   john.doe@gmail.com
   j.o.h.n.d.o.e@gmail.com
   johndoe+spam@gmail.com
   john....doe+spam@gmail.com

but johndoe.spam@gmail.com wouldn't go to the same mailbox.

john...doe@gmail.com doesn’t seem to work though. I don’t think Gmail takes multiple dots.

Not just Gmail, that’s a syntactically invalid email address. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Local-part for details.

But sure, you could have `(my name is)john."..".doe+spam(...)@gmail.com` if you wanted to. Syntactically valid! The parenthesised bits would be stripped out before sending, and I have no idea whether Gmail would be willing to accept the quoted dots bit.

Haha, I debated about throwing in the multi-dot address. Bummed that it was a bad example. :(

As for parens, I recollect the spec lets you nest your parens and quotes! It's insane. e.g. `f(oo."(bar."baz")."quux)@example.com` is valid in the spec.

I wrote an Oracle regex to parse for valid email addresses and I went against the spec rather than what is what's practically used. It was an insane thing.

Gmail lets you add "." in arbitrary places, but not to append additional text.

For example: foobar@ foo.bar@ f.o.o.b.a.r@ are all valid and normalize the case without the periods.

Periods are handled slightly differently than "+" characters in Gmail -- periods are ignored (so an email to email.spam@gmail would be delivered to emailspam@gmail.com), while everything following a + would be delivered (so email+spam@gmail.com will be delivered to email@gmail.com).

This doesn't work for me

bar.foo@gmail.com

gets rejected as email address doesn't exist when my gmail is bar@gmail.com

That's because the email in fact went to barfoo@gmail.com, not bar@gmail.com

So if you wanted to use it like this you would try something like b.ar@gmail.com

It is indeed a good way to filter out _all_ email...

No, you cant.

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