> I could go in and set up a dot/non dot email address to people I know and just wait until I receive an email that was supposed to be for them but now goes to my email account.
Err, you can't do that?
The fact that somebody's email address is johndoe at gmail.com, and the fact that Gmail strips all the dots from the username, imply that john.doe and john.d.oe and so on… are taken as well.
You just can't register as e.g. john.doe and get johndoe's mail redirected because for Google, these two aliases are the exact same username!
(An exercise for the reader: if you have a Google account, try to log in by putting random dots in your username. Then, try to create a new account by putting random dots in your login.)
