Dots in gmail don’t count… and this is idiotic

Is this really an issue? I mistype my email address regularly but it is never the period that is wrong.

Clearly the author believes it is and they have more experience than I but I just don't see how this can be a significant problem, it is less of a problem than the gmail/googlemail issue that many European people with old enough gmail accounts have (gmail was trademarked at the time and thus they had to use googlemail.com so I still have to use googlemail.com address for certain shitty systems that don't let me update my email address easily).

What Julien laments is strange to many people. I found this behavior unexpected and hackish when I first heard about it. Now, after thinking about some of the implications for users and other applications, I'm not sure I have a firm opinion about it.

Yes, it is a pain for third-party apps doing logins or password recovery. That said, it would be possible handle gmail addresses as a special case, which I admit is annoying from a software developer perspective.

But we build tools, supposedly, to please customers, right? What do the customers want? From a user perspective, what Google is doing may be best. It is, after all, consistent with Postel's law / the robustness principle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle

A non issue really, all you need is a filter in your backend that removes dots in gmail addresses before saving to database or querying for records. That's about 4 lines of code. It's the developer's job to know about edge cases like that and make sure it is properly handled.

I doubt anyone even thought about 3rd parties using email addresses as primary index keys when they dropped the dot. Its not arrogance so much as overlooking an issue.

People need to stop with this histrionic bs when it comes to engineering mistakes. Its not the end of the world. This guy needs to take a chill pill and calm down.

Also, it is annoying that this non-standard choice by Gmail puts other companies and services into the position of (a) surprising and maybe disappointing users with behavior different than Gmail or (b) behaving in the same way as Gmail by disregarding dots in gmail accounts.

On the plus side, this lets you create multiple third-party accounts using the same gmail address for verification. I've done this a lot for various nefarious purposes ;)

Also, it's not something they can "undo". A lot of people started with "first.last@gmail" and later started telling people "firstlast@gmail.com" (I do that now).