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Comment by murrayb | Hacker News Reader

I have a firstname.lastname Gmail account. Neither frst or last are particularly common. There are various people around the planet who hand out my address as there own, I get invoices on a regular basis but also correspondence from real estate agents and legal correspondence. Most recently I spam listed a Canadian telco because some gentleman in Canada is joyfully handing out my address. On the other hand I very rarely get someone else's snail mail and if I do it is for a neighbour I know a house or two away and never someone in another country :-)

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"." is a ghost character for gmail.

firstname.lastname (at) gmail and firstnamelastname (at) gmail

are the same address.

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150?hl=en

Not quite as I learned, for connected services. If you registered originally as johndoe@gmail.com and use john.doe@gmail.com it works fine for mail. For Log-in-with-Google, it goes back to johndoe@gmail.com and many websites treat that as a distinct account. Now you end up with two distinct accounts on the "same" gmail. Not great.

It can also be that instead of people giving your Gmail address as their own, the receiver ignores the domain and just assumes that it's @gmail.com. I've had that happen a couple times.

People also get very confused about + in addresses.

Yes, i have people sending me emails at first.last.com@gmail.com, instead of first@last.com. How I know? They type both addresses just to be sure.

I get loads of invoices, too, from all over the Commonwealth. The more I think about it, the more I suspect the author is right: there are a lot of people out there who think you can just type someone's last name into webmail and it's just going to magically go to the person they intended.

Well that is how Gmail works if it finds a contact in your address book... type the name and it autocompletes. You could be on the receiving end of autocomplete failures that go unnoticed by the sender.

I considered that, but then I checked and saw that almost all of them are coming from other domains, and often non-webmail domains. Of course, whatever email management software or app they're using on their end could be doing that, too.

I use exclusively custom domain emails but use Gmail to manage all of them.

I have the same format for my gmail account, with a second that has a middle initial, and neither account ever really gets that sort of traffic.

Literally the only time I've gotten something that was for another person is when someone else with my exact name purchased something medical and they emailed the receipt to "firstnamelastname@gmail.com". It turns out that if gmail receives an email in that format and all they find is "firstname.lastname@gmail.com", they'll go ahead and stuff it into that inbox.

I was able to track the person down, call them, explain what happened, forward the email to them, and delete it.

My name isn't super uncommon, but for whatever reason I don't get those sorts of emails.

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