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Comment by inanutshellus | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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