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Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

Gmail also parses out periods in the address. j.smith@gmail.com will go to the same place as `jsmith@gmail.com`.

I have firstnamelastname@gmail.com and it surprises me how many other people have my same name. I get so much unintended mail, usually to firstname.lastname at gmail. I have found that in a lot of cases they have forgotten a middle initial. I usually let it go as spam unless it looks important like a credit card. What frustrates me is that these companies will not interface with me at all, sometimes not even leaving a note on the account.

I understand from the security side why they wont, but I wish there was something they could do. I could easily log in and change a password then cancel the account, but I figure there's probably some legal trouble if I did that.

I get credit card stuff and credit report stuff from bozos with similar nanes to me. I used to try to inform them, they won't let me. The worst are Experian, who won't let me interact with them at all, because I can't prove I'm the person or people who've been mistakenly using my email address.

You'd think that they would be willing to interact with someone sending emails from the same address they're spamming!

My stock reply to this used to be that you can send emails from anyone - who the email is sent from is not authenticated.

It's a little less true now with some of the newer protections, but only today I received a fairly subtle spam/scam supposedly from the main email address of a major retailer, so I think it's still sensible to never every trust the "From:" part of an email.

Sure, but they could just sent a link back to the same address with a form to fill out the complaint, or even just a phone number saying "call this number to speak to customer service about the issue you're having". From a technical standpoint, it's not hard at all to invert things to use the address as a recipient in a way that confirms that someone is able to access the email sent to it. A company like Experian that claims to have info on literally a billion people would be silly not to recognize that their scale is going to occasionally end up with mistaken contact info, so if they cared at all about the quality of their data, they would have some sort of system established to handle this.

This is an useful to know for websites that incorrectly mark the address as invalid for a '.' in the local portion.

Is this something you come across often? I always give the canonical spelling of my email, dots included, and can't remember a time when it wasn't accepted.

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