*@gmail.com (opens in new tab)

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.

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…

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.

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

Sorry to nitpick, but I believe that "anecdata" is strictly plural and as such "one anecdata" is grammatically incorrect. It should probably be just "one anecdote", but if you want to emphasize the "data" aspect, I'd go with "one point of anecdata" or more concisely - "one anecdatum".

Somewhat surprisingly to me, "anecdatum" has apparently never yet appeared in print [0], and I'm happy for the two of us to share credit in coining it.

[0] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=anecdatum

Isn’t that functionally the same as “ignore dots”?

Meaning they can just strip out the dots when matching email addresses: either on login/signup or mail routing.

> The “+” aspect mostly works great but has some weird edge cases when other companies don’t accept them.

I wish it was just edge cases! I've bumped into so many services that can't handle "+" in email addresses, some seem to be on purpose (presumably to prevent signing up multiple accounts to the same address) but others are just old school bugs. My fav is services that send the email address to an API including the email address as a URL parameter, but forget to escape the email address so the + gets butchered in the process.

Oh, yikes: when did the + stop working for Apple support? That's going to bite me at some point. (And in general, yeah: I've had multiple cases over the years where the "+" only caused problems after signup. One of several reasons that I eventually stopped using those forms.)

And just to put it out there: "+" addresses aren't specifically a Gmail thing, they've been supported by most(?) mail servers for a very long time.

One problem I've encountered is that usually sites won't allow you to register an account if the email address is already registered at that site. So if I register foo@gmail.com then someone else can't accidentally register foo@gmail.com. But they can register f.o.o@gmail.com just fine.

So I mean at my Gmail I have all manner of different Facebook accounts with various misspelling of my email address notifying me of stuff, none of them are mine. I'm sure they entered my email address (with dots) by accident, not on purpose.

I appreciate that sites not allowing you to register the same email address twice hardly solves everything, as I absolutely get email to my actual correct Gmail address from random sites I've never signed up for. But at least it would help in certain cases like Facebook where I do have an account.

To borrow an example from Internet domain names, consider:

  experts.exchang@gmail.com

  expert.sexchange@gmail.com

Those addresses would be identical by Gmail's parsing conventions.

I have a big problem because this, my account is créate in closed beta period, in this stage this feature does exist.

My email: name.alias@gmail, because already exists namealias@gmail. Ok the email Work fine for 4y before this feature exists, after if email send exacly works but the problem i am started reciving email for the other user and this is e-mail is not cool.

After 10y i give up of gmail and moved to my domain

imagine that you have an address name.surname@gmail.com

imagine that someone else has an address namesurname@gmail.com

this is very similar case to my mom's one. she constantly gets emails meant for someone else - including PII - because she has no dot in email, but the other party has a dot.

I know for sure that her's account is quite old one.

I get literally hundreds of unsolicited emails a week.

Can you give an example please?

How dose ignoring dots cause you to receive other peoples mail?

I'm not sure if you can use f..oo@gmail.com but if your email address is longer than a few characters then there are definitely a large number of combinations you can use if you want to register multiple accounts at one service, foo@, f.oo@, fo.o@, f.o.o@ etc.

You can also use foo+extra@gmail.com and the +extra will be ignored, so you can give each service a separate email address like foo+hn@gmail.com.

Beware, as I found out the hard way, this makes account recovery more difficult. To reset your password you need to enter your email address usually. But if you used +foo stuff then you might not be able to remember what email address you used.

I get HUNDREDS of emails that I never signed up for due to this. If Gmail bounced them (as it should), it would be a godsend.

>> If you ignored the conversation you may not have seen it, but most reply-all storm ended up with someone saying something the line of "we don't care about your wallet".

Not quite. It started with a meeting invite that was accidentally sent to everyone. The meeting was for the Amazon Wallet team (I think they did something with payments, etc.) for whatever work they were doing at the time.

Most people ignored the meeting invite and just deleted it, but someone hit "Reply All" and said something to the effect of "I know this meeting invite was not for me, but I wanted to make sure that whoever was supposed to get it did not miss the meeting."

From there, it turned into a "Reply All" storm with lots of people replying all with "Please do not reply all".

Others thought it was funny and sent memes. One guy was so bold to promote his indie rock band that was taking off.

The incident is famous and became known as "Wallet", but the name comes from the Amazon Wallet team.

The eventual solution was that email lists with more than k (500?) people on it required an admin to approve all messages going out on that list.

It really simplified things.

It happened to me in a large company I worked with. Someone, probably an admin sent an email to the entire company, literally tens of thousands of people in the "To:" field. Of course, a few of them replied-all, then others replied to tell people to stop replying, etc... The server couldn't follow and mail couldn't be delivered fast enough, prompting even more replies. Email unrelated to the incident took 30 minutes to come through. Admins had to intervene, and the servers were down for about 4 hours, everything related to the incident was deleted server-side, and probably blacklisted too. The client couldn't do much, we didn't even get that many emails (a few dozens at most) since the server couldn't deliver them.

It was a very expensive email for sure.

If people understood this feature they probably would also understand why they are in a reply-all storm and not need that feature.

gmail has the “mute” feature single key press ‘m’ away.

I admit have been tempted to respond to some reply-all maelstrom mailstorms to herald the mute key…

Well now you gotta tell us the story.

I registered my Gmail account in September 2004 (so around 3 months after it was publicly introduced) and the ignore-ruled was already in place then. I'm pretty sure what you describe is not possible.

That's pretty interesting, I just tried it with my aaaaaa@gmail (wrong letters) account.

I sent email to aaaaa.a@gmail and to aaa.aaa@gmail and receive both.

I was like the meme of the guy slapping the big red button trying to stop myself from replying-all with "OK."

X@domain.com is my address (that was before twitter)

404 is handled exceptionally inside the sequence, and for a while it was double-exceptionally possible to land on it through the random button:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190328010454/https://plus.goog... (via explainkcd)

I had no idea! I'll have to try and find that.