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Comment by nmeofthestate | Hacker News Reader

> This is a great reminder that Gmail ignores dots on the left side of the @ symbol, which means I am constantly getting e-mail for other people.

Genuinely confused - which other people? There are no other people with your Gmail address but added/removed '.' characters. What you're seeing is people sending emails to the wrong email address - nothing to do with presence or absence of '.' characters.

Allowing addresses to subtly differ based on '.' presence/absence would result in more wrongly addressed emails, hence the aliasing.

I've been getting wrong Gmail emails all the time for years because a woman in Saskatchewan keeps getting her email wrong when signing up to stuff online. Quite funny really but nothing to do with .'s

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I’ve got firstname.lastname@gmail.com and apparently someone with my same name believes they have the address with no dot, as they keep signing up for services like Facebook with it and sharing it with their friends who email me.

It is quite the odd situation. I reply to their friends saying they have the wrong email, but they don’t seem to believe me. And they keep signing up for things despite presumably never being able to actually access many of these services that require email verification.

My guess is it is someone not very computer literate. But it is always amusing.

I have my last name at Gmail, and the number of people who think it's their email is absurd

probably has two email accounts, on with firstnamelastname and the other with @gmail.com, and keeps mixing them up

Yeah that does seem likely

I always wondered if those people don't notice something is broken.

Given how reliably this happens, I guess the answer is "no". It's also probably a very small number of people, just 1 or 2 with each commonly used name. But still every common name has those 1 or 2.

I wonder if this could be intentional for identity theft or registering an account without using your own mail. Consistently forgetting one's e-mail is a bit weird, but makes sense too of course.

My email doppelganger tried signing up for something recently, so I just went to the site and put in his email address so he can click the link and sign-up.

I have the same problem. The other guy owns a grocery store in Michigan and some of the stuff I get is wild - invoices, Azure professional services, hotels.com. I'm nice 1 or 2x if it looks important then comes the spam button.

Same.

The most humerus conversation I got added to involved a local residential community dispute where everyone assumed my insistence of being removed from the thread was actually my namesake trying to avoid the conversation.

His wife finally stepped in to resolve the situation.

> I've been getting wrong Gmail emails all the time for years because a woman in Saskatchewan keeps getting her email wrong when signing up to stuff online.

I have the same problem but multiplied by 25x due to having a <first initial><last name> gmail address from 2004 when it was still invite only. It’s really annoying that there’s so many services that don’t verify email addresses…

How would they verify without not emailing you?

Because third party sites treat them as different - so everyone that signs up for Hulu with some combination of my email address but with dots, the confirmation goes to me. I have an early, small gmail name and am inundated with these kinds of emails and it is directly attributable to this.

How would they sign up with an address that they couldn't verify?

I want invalid e-mails to be bounced back, period (if you’ll pardon the pun).

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