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Comment by blindm | Hacker News Reader

I love the way most services treat dotted addresses as separate addresses. So for example if you wanted multiple accounts on $service you could register the following:

    john.doe@gmail.com
    j.ohndoe@gmail.com
    jo.hndoe@gmail.com
    joh.ndoe@gmail.com
    johnd.oe@gmail.com
    johndo.e@gmail.com

And now you have six accounts, with the bonus of receiving mail in the same inbox for each account!

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It is worth noting that these are different addresses. They all go to the same inbox but that isn't part of the "email API".

Of course some services don't like this so they special case gmail.com addresses to try to block this but it is perfectly legal for a mail server to route these to different mailboxes (such as GSuite accounts do).

You can also use @googlemail.com domain name instead of @gmail.com to double the number of email addresses.

Yes, you could do even more shenanigans registering with the following:

    john.doe+uniquestring@gmail.com
    j.ohndoe+uniquestring@gmail.com
    jo.hndoe+uniquestring@gmail.com
    joh.ndoe+uniquestring@gmail.com
    johnd.oe+uniquestring@gmail.com
    johndo.e+uniquestring@gmail.com

    john.doe+uniquestring@@googlemail.com
    j.ohndoe+uniquestring@@googlemail.com
    jo.hndoe+uniquestring@@googlemail.com
    joh.ndoe+uniquestring@@googlemail.com
    johnd.oe+uniquestring@@googlemail.com
    johndo.e+uniquestring@@googlemail.com

Oops there's a mistake there; there's supposed to be just one `@` symbol!

And if you somehow didn't know there is the possibility of adding +anything to your email, so that you can do john.doe+servicename@gmail.com and know which service leaked your email to spammers/advertisers

well, using the dot between any two letters or not, you have 2^6 = 64 combinations (without even using double or triple dots...)

You can also add multiple dots :)

Yes but I imagine most services would spot that as an invalid address? Although it's worth trying something like

    john...doe@googlemail.com

To see if it passes as a valid address. Don't use this for evil, okay?

No, not multiple dots in a row. They still have to be between two non-dot characters.

Two dots in the email instead of one:

    j.o.hndoe@gmail.com
    j.oh.ndoe@gmail.com
    j.ohn.doe@gmail.com
    j.ohnd.oe@gmail.com
    j.ohndo.e@gmail.com
    jo.h.ndoe@gmail.com
    ...
    johnd.o.e@gmail.com

you can do that with gmail with the + character.

john.doe+beta@gmail.com john.doe+delta@gmail.com

they all go to the same address

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