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Comment by Lazare | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit skeptical Google ever treated `fname.lname@gmail.com` and `fnamelname@gmail.com` as different accounts.

I registered the `fname.lname` version very early on (before GMail was freely available), and while I do sometimes get emails sent to the `fnamelname` variant, which is consistent with someone having signed up with that variant, but is also consistent with someone just forgetting what their email address is (eg, they meant to type `fnamelname@hotmail.com`, or `fnamejlname`, or whatever). Especially since the mixups are very, veyr rare.

I can't rule out some weird collection of google bugs, but Occam's Razor suggests it's just an occasional typo. Especially until someone pulls up two screenshots of Google accounts showing colliding addresses.

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I think there's a wrinkle here to do with @googlemail.com, which was the original domain name for users in the UK where 'Gmail' was trademarked by another company.

I've seen some fairly convincing evidence to suggest that different people have been able to register fnamelname@googlemail.com and fname.lname@gmail.com and, for them, the usual rule that you can add a '.' anywhere before the @ doesn't hold true.

I think you are correct. I am in the same boat. Consistently, if I send emails to myfirstnamemylastname@gmail.com they are delivered to me. Without fail. I too registered in the beta phase and I do not think anyone has an account without or with more periods than mine.

The type of messages I receive are typically one of things like hotel, reservations, e-commerce shopping receipts. Likely someone misunderstands the address or misses a letter in between. Maybe alerting everone from myfirstnameAmylastname… to myfirstnameZmzlastname@gmail.com helps them take better care.

My email is fname.m.lastname@. My last name starts with a vowel. There is another surname that is mine with a leading consonant which happens to be my middle initial.

There is an older man, late 60s I think, with that name. I receive his email at least once a month. I have received sensitive emails, and I could no doubt perform some sort of computer fraud with those. He is not forgetting his email and putting a period in between the first letter of his name and the rest of it.

The Google ecosystem is vast. Somewhere within that ecosystem is one or more components that strips and/or ignores the dots, and for that split second his email and mine are identical.

No, that guy really just doesn't know what his address is. There is no fname.mlastname@ account. You can verify that very easily by sending an email to that address. 100% of the time it will arrive into your account. Or you can try logging into it with your password.

In Google's account system, there's ~nothing you can do with just the username. You need a user id. The only way you can get a user id from a username is to call an RPC service to do the lookup. Doesn't matter whether it's for logging in, finding the account to deliver email to, creating an account, or whatever. Everything goes through that chokepoint. And that RPC server will always normalize the username at lookup time.

(I probably read that normalization code more often than anyone when working at Google on account security stuff, since that was the single place that had any reason to deal with usernames rather than user ids. That code was effectively immutable.)

Wait, what you're describing sounds like Gmail working exactly as documented. If I understand correctly, your name is something like John P. Smith, and there is also someone named John Psmith. You own john.p.smith@gmail.com, which means you also own every variation of that address created by adding or removing dots, such as johnpsmith@gmail.com or jo.hnps.mith@gmail.com. This of course includes john.psmith@gmail.com. It is entirely yours, and nobody else can have it. If someone gives it out as their own address, they are simply confused.

I registered my Gmail account very shortly after the invite-only public beta began, so my Gmail username is simply my first name (in this example, it would be john@gmail.com). Believe me, I know a thing or two about confused people giving out email addresses that don't belong to them.

Importantly, the dot-normalization rule was there from the very beginning. You learned about it alongside all the other kooky ways Google had decided to reimagine email, including 1 GB of storage, conversation threading, and an interface with a prominent "Archive" button but no visible "Delete" button.

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