Sure. At the user signup side, block emails that are too close in ways like case, but as a sender you should always treat them as unique emails.
Languages that don't have case is not an issue; the situations where a lowercase <-> uppercase mapping is not simple are actually not that many. It's not trivial, but not all that complex either. The most annoying part is Turkish, Azeri, and Lithuanian where the rules differ a bit but the used language is often unknown. For the purpose of matching things ("is this email address known in our system?") it's actually not that hard, since you can just treat several characters as identical (displaying text correctly to users is harder, but that's not important here).
I see this attitude in various situations, often under "falsehoods programmers believe" articles, which goes something like "it's hard in a few rare cases, therefore we should not do it at all for the >99% cases where it's simple and unproblematic".
edit: wow. goodbye gmail
"if your email is johnsmith@gmail.com, you own all dotted versions of your address:
john.smith@gmail.com jo.hn.sm.ith@gmail.com j.o.h.n.s.m.i.t.h@gmail.com"
>johnsmith@gmail.com and j.o.h.n.s.m.i.t.h@gmail.com are the same address and go to one inbox
I have an account with the dot, that was made in age, when Gmail was invite-only. Few years ago, someone created an account without the dot. Yes, I'm receiving their mail, and have no way to contact them, because everything I send out comes back to me.
My coworker told me there's a complete stranger who, every time she emails her son, accidentally sends the email to him first. This has been going on for years, she makes the same mistake every time, she doesn't learn her son's actual email address, and she doesn't learn to press "reply."
I'm 100% sure the "non-dot-version" doesn't exist as a separate account.
Google’s gmail people aren’t really as smart as they think they are.
That Another John Doe never, ever had access to johndoe@gmail.com, they just gave a wrong address. That's not gmail's fault.
This. My wife and I have two flavors of this.
Her address is firstmlast@gmail.com. There people frequently forget the m initial and somebody else owns firstlast@gmail.com She's since started using dots first.m.last to mitigate the error.
My address is firstlast@gmail, where first and last are not globally common, but are fairly common in Scotland. Once a year or so, I receive email for somebody else that shares my name. I don' know his real email, but I've been "invited" on his family vacations 3-4 times now. Infrequent enough that I just respond "thanks for the invite, but I think you'll be disappointed when I arrive and not the Alistair you were expecting."
It's actually not a super common first and last, so firstlast@ knows when to who to forward.
I signed up for my university's email forwarding for alumni early on and got my first name as my email. For quite a while, I would get emails, including fairly sensitive ones, sent to me by not yet very email savvy people just assuming you could send an email to someone's first name and it would get to them.
I received 2-3 personal emails, but most of them are automated invoices.
Nobody else can register an email that is the same as yours but without a dot. So the only way you receive someone else's email is if they give the wrong address.
That's not my experience. Which non-gmail email software ignores dots before the @?
Thinking about this, I guess the sending MTA doesn't care about dots; it goes RCPT TO: <address.with.dots@example.com>. The receiving MTA then has to validate that address; it does that using some account database that isn't typically part of the MTA - it could be a unix account (no dots!), a database table, or an LDAP user. Finally it passes the mail off to a delivery agent, which hopefully relies on the same account database.
So the elision of dots appears to be a feature of certain account databases. So which account databases elide dots?
[0] https://www.postfix.org/ADDRESS_REWRITING_README.html#virtua...
I guess this is another falsehood people believe about emails.
> Nobody else can register an email that is the same as yours but without a dot.
It used to be possible, then google decided to stop allowing that (guess why?)
And by the way, that’s an arbitrary decision.
I have run mail servers and it’s just and cam tell you… it’s an arbitrary decision.
Yeah. That's fine.
If my email is LLLLLLLLLLLL@example.com because I want to be cute I have to tell people to type exactly the right number of L's. Do you think they should just be able to type a lot of L's and as long as it's somewhere near it counts as the same email address?
In a world where email addresses are always case sensitive, everyone will use lowercase (like they pretty much always already do anyway), and it'll be fine.
This in itself sounds is a falsehood!
In a world where email addresses were "obviously" case sensitive, "LLL" mapping to "lll" would be just as crazy as "LLLLLLLLLL" mapping to "LLLLLLLLLLL".
They just seem similar, to humans. But they're different strings.
Ah, youth. There was little choice! Sometimes you had only six bits for a character; sometimes your bytes could be from 1-36 bits wide, depending on what you wanted for your program, so you might have systems that mixed six-bit (only upper case) and early ascii (two cases) and so for matching you had to be case insensitive.
It’s easy to look back and say “those people were so stupid” but they weren’t.
E-Mail wouldn't have been widely accepted with case sensitive addresses.
People expect that MyName@mail.com reaches the same person like myname@mail.com or Myname@Mail.COM just like letters reach their recipient irrespective of the upper and lower case of the recipient's name.
Computers are there to make the lives of the users easier, not the programmers.
However it being insensitive has probably helped a lot of times where people make mistakes in explaining or copying those capitals.
Similar to how gmail ignores . in emails but other hosts do not.
I don't think they really do. They may think case matters somehow, and so may be careful to reproduce the exact case that they used before, but I don't think many people would expect JohnDoe@gmail.com and johnDoe@gmail.com to be too different email accounts.
original ASCII only had uppercase. When lowercase got added, gradually with newer systems and software, without case insensitivity you would have had massive incompatibilities which probably would have hampered or even arrested the introduction of lowercase in new systems
and all over again, when microcomputers first came out, they came out with uppercase only to cut complexity and cost on simple systems.
i'm not going to explore the entire history, but just looked this up. TL;DR example, the addition of lowercase characters represented a jump from 6 bits to 7 bits at the hardware level:
"A six-bit character code is a character encoding designed for use on computers with word lengths a multiple of 6. Six bits can only encode 64 distinct characters, so these codes generally include only the upper-case letters, the numerals, some punctuation characters, and sometimes control characters. The 7-track magnetic tape format was developed to store data in such codes, along with an additional parity bit."
Fun fact: the reason we pronounce "ph" like "f" is because the Greek letter was originally pronounced like p-h, at the time Romans began stealing words, but then the Greeks started pronouncing it like "f" and the Romans followed suit, but kept the old Latinization of "ph", because they'd already carved it into stone.
English spelling is largely phonetic... but it captures the phonetic spelling across dozens or hundreds of shifts in the spoken language. Unless you can stop people from changing how they speak, any phonetic spelling reboot is either going to suffer from the same problem, or words will constantly change how they are spelled to keep up with the spoken word.
It also helps to limit the fragmentation of pronunciation of words.
conversely it's certainly been an obvious disadvantage (posed a lot of problems and imposed a lot of awkward workarounds) for mechanical/electronic communication - now you have to enter the characters too, and you have to express that larger number of characters efficiently. In practice, a lot of electronic communication is just simplified to ASCII because that's the set that works universally. Someone used the example of ess-tset being transliterated as "ss" in german, dunno if chinese uses anything similar, but it wouldn't surprise me, obviously Japanese has romaji too.
but at a human-interface level, fundamentally there is a limit to how many symbols people can absorb. Even with latin characters, people at best will sight-read whole words to increase symbol rate, but, the natural evolution is to use 1 character to represent 1 symbol/word, that's the highest possible rate at which humans can absorb symbols for a written system. And in turn you could in principle absorb a "word of symbols", which is a sentence, similar to how western readers can sight-read a word of our 1-character glyphs.
by "increasing the dimensionality" of the symbol, you increase the effective symbol rate, similar to how memes use subtext/etc to convey more nuance than a pure text can by itself.
This is already how it works. Senders are not supposed to assume that local-parts are case-insensitive. (Some buggy implementations ignore this requirement and upper-case everything, but the serious implementations don’t).
You also don't get to argue with the fusional position changes in Arabic, or the ligatures in Devanagari, or the places within a square the featural particles of Hangul must be printed in.
These things aren't negotiable.
Of course, most languages aren't written at all ... or at least don't have a traditional written form that is sufficiently well established for someone to say that the "language" has case rather than a particular (proposed) way of writing it.
However, I rather suspect that the majority of languages in which books are published use some variant of the Latin alphabet and do, therefore, have case. (The only language I've heard of that uses the Latin alphabet without case is Lojban!)
On the other hand, if you weight languages by the number of (native) speakers, since about three quarters of the world's population lives in China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Japan or Korea, probably it's true that most people don't use case in their main language.
Case is only used in a few alphabets, mainly Latin-, Cyrillic-, and Greek-derived ones.
For that matter typesetting rules vary by language as well — not just the obvious hyphenation rules busnspacimg as well. Just pick up a book in, say, French or Russian and you can tell at a glance (without even looking at the letters) that it’s not in English.
However, I don't agree with your point about typeset text. You're right that the styles differ, but if you have learned one style, and know the language of the text, you will not need any significant amount of time to read a different style of typesetting.
Russian of course normally uses the Cyrillic alphabet, not the Latin one, so obviously you do have to learn a whole new set of symbols to understand it even if you can read Latin symbols. And of course French uses slightly more letters/letter forms than English, with the sedile and four accents (egu, grave, circonflex, and very rare treme).
I didn’t mean the typesetting differences made reading a different language in any way hard, merely pointing out that there are lots of different aspects to text in different languages even when the alphabets are basically the same.
Oh, you want speakers? merely counting people who read Hanzi + Arabic-Alphabet readers + the Indian subcontinent gets you more half the world‘s population. And there are hundreds, maybe over a thousand writing systems.
Latin is much more wide-spread than that! You neglect whole of America and Australasia and half of Africa.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/Writing_...
> So a big imbalance!
When we sum up realistically, then world-wide the amount of users of writing systems with case/"cameral" are about equally balanced with those without.
Fx in danish we have 3 letters (æøå) that is not common in the latin alphabet. I cant go to germany or turkey and expect people to be able to write out those letters when doing input in a local system.
Germany relatively adopted an uppercase ß (and got it into Unicode) to try to help with case roundtripping but I’ve never seen it in the wild. And let’s not get into obsolete German Fraktur ligatures like tz or ch which also had no upper case equivalents.
The parenthetical part is true. It was an uphill battle, but not because of the consortium, but because of what the tropes wiki would describe as executive meddling.
The adoption is not recent, but about 110 years old. You have the wrong idea because of sloppy journalism.
> I’ve never seen it in the wild
I see it all the time. Maybe you are undercounting. Pay attention to non-standard letterforms on hand-written signs, and you also have to include print media where someone substituted lower-case ß in absence of a glyph in a font. This is a typographic mistake, but the intent is clear.
I don't think that's right. It's used in certain contexts like all caps.