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Comment by robbyking | Hacker News Reader

A coworker of mine got an email once containing important scholarship information intended for a high school kid in Florida. He did a little looking online and found the kid's and his parent's actual email addresses and forwarded the email to them.

So here's where it gets weird/dumb: the kid replies to my friend and his parents and says, "hey mom, you put the wrong email address on my application, there's no dot in mine."

So my coworker, being the only tech savvy person on the thread replies. "Well, actually, [...]" and explains how dots are(n't) handled in Gmail address. Then the parents then reply and write, "but that's your old Gmail address, we had to get you a new one when we moved to Florida."

At this point my coworker gave up and the kid presumably lost his scholarship because his family didn't know you could keep your Gmail address when you moved houses.

(If you're reading this, hi Jake H.!)

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I have a common last name and my email is my first initial and my last name.

I get so much misdirected mail that I don’t even try to help these people.

I hope John gets to his zoom interview for Deputy Chief of Police later today, because I’m not going to tell him about it.

I'm in a similar situation. I was lucky enough to claim my Gmail address during the beta.

For the first few years I tried to be kind and alert the sender, but it just became impractical to do so.

It breaks my heart when I see my name twin receiving state benefit notifications or HR notices at the wrong address. He's currently applying for quite a few electrician openings. Good luck, my man.

Happens to me all the time, because my name is fairly common. Weird that Google wont "fix" that.

I ... hope Google never tries to fix your name being fairly common.

Out of curiosity, what would a "fix" look like?

Never showing the email address to anyone, just letting you scan a QR code, or copy-paste a rich-text non-editable widget and passing it around. It is the same idea as not showing the URL in the address bar, it solves 1 major problem and raises dozen others.

Happens all the time to me. Some of my fellow [first-initial][last-names] are "smart" people -- a professor and a judge, among others -- and I know that they are putting in their own email wrong.

I know this because I'm frequently getting mail from automated systems for something they filled out.

I mean, I know there's an xkcd about this, but seriously? How do you mistype your own email address so often? In both cases, their real addresses are [first-name][last-name].

Probably due to their workplaces using different schemes

e.g. My personal is [firstname].[lastname] and work is [firstinitial][lastname]

If I didn’t use macros I’m sure I’d eventually mix them up too.

> you could keep your Gmail address when you moved houses.

In understanding what went wrong here, it's worth noting that historically it was more common to have your email service provided by your ISP. If you moved to a house that wasn't served by the same ISP, your new ISP provided email bundled with the rest of the service at no extra charge, and you didn't want to keep paying to retain your old email, there were circumstances under which a move of house might have motivated a change of email.

Of course this was never relevant to gmail, but it might have been a part of the reason for the confusion. Or it might very well not have.

You will often see people in France who have a @internet.provider address.

The law here is that once you have it, you can keep it when changing providers at no cost, they have to make it available to you.

I always found it weird, especially when you have so much choice of provider-free ones (less in France than in other countries but still)

I (and I believe most of us) never use the email address that the ISPs provide, just so we can have our own. Who would ever want to use the HenryBemis4618362783@ISP.com???

The 75% of people who don't know you get a choice.

I do not understand what "have your own" means. I HAVE mine, the internet box gave it to me and it works.

^^^ this is the reality of the world , with people for whom edge = internet.

Of course you can get your domain and self-host your MTA (I am sure that this is what you are doing because who would ever want to be dependent on some provider, seriously). You are in the 10^-(whatever)% of the population that understand these words - and that's the reason people have firstnamelastname7656@isp.com as the address.

I occasionally see a public-ish figure with a website where they publish their email address. This last week, saw someone who advertised their "@cox.com" address. I move way too often to have any kind of confidence in a utility email address like that.

You mean cox.net? I think cox.com is for COX employees. Comcast does the same thing with comcast.com and comcast.net

Possibly, I looked up cox.com and it redirected to https://www.cox.com/residential/home.html so I thought that might be it.

I remember seeing @cox in the email though.

Happens to me all the time but not due to dots. People just don't know their own email addresses.

> At this point my coworker gave up and the kid presumably lost his scholarship because his family didn't know you could keep your Gmail address when you moved houses.

Didn't your colleague forward the information ?

I think their meaning was they stopped replying to further email back and forth with people who clearly were very far from understanding and whose ongoing conversation was becoming increasingly frustrating to deal with due to their misplace mental model around how email works which then then relied upon to continue to correspond with the sender.

similar. A younger fella has my first and last name. I've gotten iphone receipts and questions on when I'm coming back to the Y (in very far away location). The best was when I got his deployment orders. I figured I probably was not supposed to ship out on a submarine, so I reached out to the sender to let them know. /shrug.

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