"If everyone would just stop replying, this would end! Why are you all still hitting reply all?!"
-latest reply all on every reply-all storm.
In my early days at Amazon, around 2012-2015, this would happen frequently enough [0]. I pretty quickly learned the best thing to do was to ignore the conversation and never think about it again rather than try to 'help'.
[0] - too many new products and orgs set up new mailing lists with 5000+ people on it, most of whom had no idea what it was. Growing pains.
At amazon in 2010, someone sent an email to everyone on the "all" mailing list to ask if anyone had seen it.
A reply-all storm ensued, and despite several people asking to stop hitting the reply-all button, it continued for several days.
The management had to chime in and sometimes threatened people with punishment if they continued participating to the reply-all storm.
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".
Anyway, asking people to stop hitting the reply-all button is far from being the latest reply-all on these kind of things...
>> 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.
There's a video on Broadcast of Russ Grandinetti emceeing an all hands, and he opens with stats from the Wallet incident. It is hilarious, folks at Amazon should watch it.
Never really happened to me, but Thunderbird has a pretty good feature for this case: "Ignore message thread". I'm sure other mail clients have this feature as well.
If someone is bothered by such a thread, it's really easy to avoid.
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.
Address not found
Your message wasn't delivered to \*@gmail.com because the address couldn't be found, or is unable to receive mail.
LEARN MORE
The response was:
550 5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist. Please try double-checking the recipient's email address for typos or unnecessary spaces.
Learn more at https://support.google.com/mail/?p=NoSuchUser f15-20020a05651201cf00b00500994b137asor390839lfp.19 - gsmtp
This is a great reminder that Gmail ignores dots on the left side of the @ symbol, which means I am constantly getting e-mail for other people.
The “+” tagging was a great idea, but the fact that incorrect address matching has become a “feature” (and not fixed over decades) plus constant spates of spam has made me believe there’s nobody left at the helm who actually understands e-mail.
I’ve kept my Gmail addresses for some mailing-lists, but moved everything of consequence to better providers.
> This is a great reminder that Gmail ignores dots on the left side of the @ symbol, which means I am constantly getting e-mail for other people.
Genuinely confused - which other people? There are no other people with your Gmail address but added/removed '.' characters. What you're seeing is people sending emails to the wrong email address - nothing to do with presence or absence of '.' characters.
Allowing addresses to subtly differ based on '.' presence/absence would result in more wrongly addressed emails, hence the aliasing.
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. Quite funny really but nothing to do with .'s
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.
I always wondered if those people don't notice something is broken.
Given how reliably this happens, I guess the answer is "no". It's also probably a very small number of people, just 1 or 2 with each commonly used name. But still every common name has those 1 or 2.
I wonder if this could be intentional for identity theft or registering an account without using your own mail. Consistently forgetting one's e-mail is a bit weird, but makes sense too of course.
My email doppelganger tried signing up for something recently, so I just went to the site and put in his email address so he can click the link and sign-up.
I have the same problem. The other guy owns a grocery store in Michigan and some of the stuff I get is wild - invoices, Azure professional services, hotels.com. I'm nice 1 or 2x if it looks important then comes the spam button.
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.
Just one anecdata, but in my case, all of the unwanted signups I get on my gmail address are not due to dots - they are flat out because people input my email address exactly the same way as I would - without dots. I think it's more a side-effect of gmail being "the" global email namespace for millions of people, not because of anything their service itself is doing.
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.
I think the problem he has with the word is data is the plural(!) for singular datum. So one data is datum, two cactuses are cacti, and two datas is data. Maybe not always colloquially but technically. Hence anecdatum and anecdata.
"Datum" is rarely used in the US, unless you want to sound pretentious. (This coming from someone who cringes every time "who/whom" is used incorrectly.) We use "data" as an uncountable noun.
It is, but the key point is that this doesn't lead to people sending mail to the wrong address since nobody can sign up to "the wrong address" in the first place. There's one address allowed, aliased to all permutations.
It does lead to people sending mail to the wrong address, from personal experience since Gmail was in beta. I've gotten sensitive emails and account signups with different dots for years.
But the cause of that appears to be user error -- people thinking they own email addresses that are not actually theirs.
This happens to me all the time. There are two people, one in Massachusetts and one in Suffolk UK who have my same name and regularly put in FirstLast@gmail as opposed to the first.last@gmail that I use. The Massachusetts person does this because they forget that their gmail is the full version of “first” as opposed to the shorter version I use. The Brit is confusing gmail for hotmail. Yes really. Most people don’t care that much about computers. If it’s possible to screw up, someone will.
Someone gets righteously indignant that this cannot happen in every thread about dots in gmail, despite the fact that there are many people it happens to. They’re not making it up, why would someone do that?
Please look at my example up thread. It’s the combination of mistakes amplified by the dots. The dots make it worse by far.
I just searched for my name with no dots in my gmail. Man. It’s a dumpster fire. I have to put up with hundreds and hundred of wrong mails monthly because this feature amplifies the mistakes so much. And it adds to spam because other people type the wrong mails into forms and gmail “fixes” it by ignoring the lack of dots. It’s honestly infuriating. We know we own all versions. We get it. That’s what causes extra work for us and makes us like the product less.
My experience would be significantly improved if I could have all the non canonical addresses bounce. I agree that I would also like nobody else to own one of the other dot versions but that’s also possible.
Rewritten:
For various reasons, people mistype emails and they usually end up with a no-dotted address. Mine, as the catch-all, gets that mail.
A classic made up example is eg “fred.fredflintstone@gmail”. I have many times received mail for that person because I’m “fred.flintstone@gmail”. People see the double fred, remove the first and hit my account. I also get for “fredtflintstone” (notice the t, many don’t) and this last month “fredrflintstone”. Life would be much easier for all if gmail just bounced those when someone types it as “fredflintstone”. They’d check and fix it.
This is amplified by spam, because any leaks others make hits my account. They should bounce.
This morning I put up a filter to the no dot version. About a month ago someone put my no-dot version on their dodgy Microsoft ads account. I spent ages trying to get off it and somehow Microsoft still hasn’t taken me off. Now I’m just filtering that to deleted, along with mail for all the mistakes above. I’m done. Gmail’s dot policy enables this hugely.
1) people who are sending important emails are ending up with the wrong person and they don’t know. Fixing that takes effort on my part, I have to tell individuals or a group mail I’m the wrong person. A bounce would fix that, instantly with no effort. I sometimes try find the right person. That also takes effort, I have to look for clues. Locations, work hints etc.
2) I’m fairly careful with my email. Others aren’t. Most of the spam I get is linked to the wrong address. Those should also be bounces. Because I get mail for all dot variants, I get a multiplied amount of spam compared to just my version.
3) I’m pretty sure a dodgy money making racket is to sign people up via affiliate programs in the hope some of those get added. I see this in a huge amount of random email lists, products etc. I’d say 80% minimum of those use the no-dot version. The problem is that 80% I shouldn’t have to put up with. The people doing this are just being lists of addresses and firing them at anything that works. They aren’t targeting me, they’re just using the strings they’ve harvested. So they don’t know about the version I use.
The Microsoft issue pushed me over the edge. I’m now going to trash that entire set of problem for my own (selfish) purposes by filtering it out. The people being harmed are those whose contacts mis-type addresses and now eg invites to funerals will go to trash.
The optional dots would seem to be irrelevant. You seem to be asking that all email sent to your address, but not intended for you, to be bounced. An email address can only be validated (as in "Is this an email address?") by trying to send mail to it. Assuming the mail is deliverable, there is literally no way for the sender or any mail server involved to know whether the address on the message has anything to do with any person who has access to the contents of that mailbox.
The only possible way that I know of to provide feedback is to send a reply to the sending address. Perhaps you're asking for an addition to the email system so that a recipient can "click a button" to generate at the protocol level a response from your mail server like "errNum% - Wrong recipient. Undeliverable as addressed."?
No, I want all mail that doesn’t use the email address I chose, which is “fred.flintstone@gmail” to be blocked as it would be on any other mail platform. I want gmail to act like any other mail provider, no dot innovation because I don’t want it. I’ve had this address since 2005. That’s a long time to learn about the benefits and costs.
Rule: for any email address variant that is not what the user selected, reply with “550 no such user here”.
Instant reduction in both spam and mistyped emails. Instant feedback to sender.
If they forgot a dot and received a "no such mailbox", they'd check and fix it.
Some data, sans opinion: I checked my trash this morning after clearing it out. Total messages in trash: 47. Trashed messages linked to the "fredflintstone" variant: 40, all of them spam. The other 7 are all real messages I've just deleted after reading, none of them are spam.
> If they forgot a dot and received a "no such mailbox", they'd check and fix it.
why would they? do you think another person would not register
fredflintstone@gmail
and another user could register
fred.flint.stone
and another user
fred.flints.tone
then you have lots of people using email addresses that are the same if the end user excludes the easily forgettable punctuation marks.
Your anecdote about one person who keeps giving your email address out does not mean that Googles dot policy is bad.
I can't expand any further on what I've already said so I'm going to leave the discussion
I’ve gotten emails from some other Gmail account, for example an Uber receipt. I found that by digging in the header that there was a “x-forwarded-to:” to me. My guess is that the original user accidentally configured a bad email forward.
That's the point I think, the dots aren't causing any issues here, some people just assume their account is f.m.lastname@gmail.com and many of them are too stubborn to accept that it's not.
They never had an email address with or without dots that's made up of the same letters as your email address. Their email address is probably very different (maybe they forgot to add a number, or a middle initial, or typed Gmail when they should've typed Outlook). The dots are just a stylistic choice.
Exactly. The dots are useful from a UX perspective, as it makes "incorrectly addressed" email more obvious.
I've spent way too much time thinking about this.
Well, specifically about the kind of person who would use an email address they don't own to (a) buy a house, (b) apply for a FL sheriff's job, (c) conduct financial transactions, etc. (all actual examples I've received).
You think you have a bead on how ignorant people are, and then you realize there's a long tail you weren't aware of...
I think there's also a distinct possibility that the senders just have the wrong email address, especially when it contains a name.
You could own steve.brown@gmail.com but someone you only occasionally do business with might have accidentally put down steven.brown@gmail.com when you first met. Emails back and forth will work (because they can reply to your emails) but when they try to send you email, someone else will receive it.
This can also go unnoticed (i.e. when someone sends an email stating "when are you sending the documents?" -> "I already did, maybe they ended up in spam, here you have them again"). People probably won't notice unless the unintended recipient tells the sender that they got the email address wrong. I imagine that might happen a few times, but after a few years of other people using your email address, you'd stop bothering.
I generally try and reply with "This email address isn't owned by the person you're trying to reach. Please reach out to them and reconfirm what email they want you to use."
Responses have been pretty bizarre though. I usually get what amounts to an "Okay".
I would have expected some sort of "Could you please delete those sensitive documents we sent you?" at minimum.
Also bizarre... I don't have a very common name or email address for my main Gmail.
I can only imagine what john.smith@gmail.com has to deal with.
From a solution / feature perspective, it'd be nice to have a auto-response + trash on anything other than allowlisted dots and plusses. Maybe Gmail supports this? The worst offenders finally got the picture, so I didn't dig into it.
Gmail does support conditional auto replies and filters. You could probably filter out most typos if you stick to your own format for every website and contact you have.
The point is "ignoring dots" doesn't lead to "constantly getting e-mail for other people" (because there are no other people that own the "dotted" version of the email).
It does though. My gmail account has a dot. For some reason someone with a similar name to mine must have for believed his address was the non dotted version of mine and to this day I keep getting emails addressed to this other person... and yes, it is a real person who I've managed to contact.
The point is that without the dots rule I'd never get those emails, and the senders would get their message bounced back right away.
The “+” aspect mostly works great but has some weird edge cases when other companies don’t accept them. For example, I have a few apple ids using this feature, from moving to different countries. Apple no longer allows new accounts using “+”. My existing accounts work for iCloud, app, store etc but they do not work for logging into Apple support.
> 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.
I think it stopped working about 3 years ago for me. I was in Japan for 10 years and moved last year, so I have been using a +japan address with apple. Of course in that time I've been using icloud and iphotos so I changed the region to my current country rather than make yet another account. I also removed the "non+" gmail address from a very old apple id thinking I could then attach that gmail address. Apple told me it would take a few months for the system to let me.
It's been a nightmare. Apple lets account creation succeed without email verification and with SMS verification. So with my very common name, as soon Apple allows it, someone with a similar name uses my email to make an apple id, preventing me from using it. Without knowing or owning their phone number, it's impossible for me to fix. It takes 2-3 weeks and multiple hour long phone calls with apple to free the email again, at which point someone else uses it and the process repeats. Every phone call is horrible, it is really confusing to explain the problem. Every phone call starts with the support staff believing I am typo'ing my email address. After a few times I gave up trying to fix it.
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.
LOL this reminds me of a hilarious bug (but only in hindsight!) I had with Discord just three days ago!
I tried to login to Discord. It detected a novel browser or location. Sure, this stuff can happen. It wanted to confirm that I was still me and asked me for my e-mail address. I gave it and it said "This e-mail address is already registered". What. Of course it is. It's me. Mine. The one I have registered with you.
Since I have a few useful things tied to Discord, I felt my pulse go up. I googled for answers, found a Reddit thread with this specific problem. They said "Hey, if you use Gmail you can use the dots-are-ignored-feature to give Discord a "new" mail that will still go to you, allowing you to verify it!" (https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/12makhd/verify_...)
Sounded clever so I gave it a fore.name.sur.name@gmail.com variant.
Sure enough, I got the mail.
I logged in. I gasped as I realized Discord had now created a new, empty user for me! It somehow thought I was a brand new user despite this was only a user account _verification_ due to changed IP or whatever to begin with.
I tried logging in to my original account once more and now I somehow got in! The verification on my new account had somehow triggered (cookie? I have no idea) that I was trustworthy again. Phew! I promptly deleted the new-account-going-to-same-mail and breathed normally again...
Instead of clicking the "login" button on discord's home page, you clicked the "Open discord in your browser" button.
This, by default if you're not logged in, takes you to a create account flow. The prompt you entered your _username_ into was the "Pick a display name" prompt. If you enter, say, "user" it silently adds numbers to your displayname to make a new username ("user1234"), rather than redirecting you to the login page or prompting you about it (like most other sites do).
At the end of the flow is a "Finish signing up", "claim your account" prompt (which really is the end of the "create a new account" flow, the ephemeral account without an email you're using there is in a partially signed up state).
This is the box where you were entering your email, getting a conflict, and ended up using a new email to create a totally new account.
I know people who use hacker news are on-average much less tech savvy than the average discord user, so I can get why you missed the login button on the home page and instead went through the "create account flow", but everything that happened is "working as intended" rather than a "bug".
I do agree the flow there is pretty confusing. They've managed to make the new user signup flow so optimized you didn't even realize you were doing it.
Still, by the time it was telling you your email was already registered, you really should have slowed down and noticed it was telling you you were creating a new account rather than using a new email address for some reason.
You're trolling, right? Discord's sign up pattern is similar enough I've actually made this mistake not once, but twice. I think it's closer to a failure of design than anything else - it's almost never correct to blame user error for things like this.
> I know people who use hacker news are on-average much less tech savvy than the average discord user
Sarcasm? Serious question. I used Discord exactly once, many years ago, and it appeared to be mostly children playing video games. I hear things have changed, but it’s hard to imagine a more tech savvy group than HN.
I hate that prominent sign up, hidden sign in pattern so much. Is it simply that a tracking system "discovered" the sign in button isn't statistically used that often so someone concluded you don't really need it?
You might be right but then why did I get in just fine the second time I opened Discord after these hoops? I clicked on the same button both times. That was about as surprising for me, that I was just suddenly logged in and fine again. On my old account. And the Reddit thread is full of people falling into this trap too?
I hadn't thought of getting possibly locked out of Discord for something so stupid. I have so much going on in there as far as dev comms... That makes me nervous now. Is there a way to export anything just in case?
I've done this at least twice for the same reasons, and it's lead to me pulling my number off discord twice now. It's stupid how similar logging in and creating an account look.
What actually happened here is that the parent commenter, instead of clicking "login", entered their username into a "enter a display name" prompt on the home page, which registers a new account using the string you entered as a _display name_, and generates a random username.
The parent poster then did not realize they had created a new account and, even when it told them their email address was registered to a different account, somehow didn't realize they should go click login instead.
I think the easiest way for discord to make this a not-confusing experience for people who aren't tech savvy enough to click "login" to login, is to make it so the signup flow is a normal explicit "Enter email, enter display name, enter username" prompt, not a flow where they silently create a username if you _just_ enter a displayname.
The reason this would help is because forcing the user to enter a username early on lets you display a "Would you like to login instead?" message if the username conflicts.
Having the user enter a non-unique displayname, and silently creating a random unique username, means the signup flow no longer has the ability to say "Are you sure you don't want to login?"
Of course, discord mostly targets relatively tech-savvy users, not the average hacker-news-user, so it probably isn't that big a deal for their main demographic.
Not trying to mislead existing users into creating new accounts.
It's really annoying that on some websites you have to open up multiple dropdowns to reach the login page, also passing five sign up buttons on the way there. It's even filled with dark patterns, with the sign up button blinking and screaming at you to click it every single time, while the login button is made smaller and grayed out. I remember GitHub pulling this shit some time ago. Once I truly couldn't find the login button and gave up, opting to guess the URL/find it in history.
What is even the purpose of that? Is it truly a scheme to get users to sign up multiple times for the same service so that the user number goes higher? That seems too dumb.
No, just @gmail.com ones, and maybe a few others - not all email providers ignore dots.
But if you do this you better do it everywhere you use email. Otherwise you can get some pretty nasty bugs where two emails aren't considered the same sometimes, are are considered the same other times.
Doesn't Facebook require users to verify the email address with a confirmation email? If so, the only Facebook spam you should be able to get would be such confirmation emails. Or what am I missing?
I can't speak about facebook but I am in the case of having a gmail address[1] with my first name initial followed by my last name and I am in the case of having people with same last name and first name initial using my email address to register. That box is polluted by regular confirmation emails followed by spams from the same many websites. It turns out that more often than not the confirmation email is made to protect the companies running the websites (I guess to limit bots and password that can't be reinitialized), not promotionnal mail registration. You still receive all the promotionnal and automated email regardless if the user is active. Different table in the database I guess. Also there websites/services that don't use confirmation emails as well as processes initiated through physical office/point of sale.
[1] now pretty much abandonned but I mostly keep it to avoid anyone obtaining it and impersonating me. I still need to do some housekeeping and make sure I am not registered anywhere with that address anymore.
In my experience, surprisingly few services nowadays require email confirmation, I suppose in the name of increasing conversions or something.
I've had a number of accounts opened in my address but with different dots (eBay, Spotify, Shutterstock) that didn't require confirmation.
I usually reset the password, inform customer service (who generally don't care, or don't want to do anything because it's not my account), and then I close the account.
Oh I wish that were true, I've been receiving email for years for someone who signed up to facebook with my email address. It's a horrible pain, you can't contact facebook without a facebook account, and I can't create one because someone already has one with my email address.
Do a password recovery, log in and simply delete the account.
I had to do this once when someone signed up to FB with my email address. It actually was an eye opening experience as to how much data FB collects from everyone.
Now keep in mind that:
1) I don't have a FB account myself
2) This person signed up with my email address (which is <something-generic>@gmail.com), but their name is completely different from mine
3) They didn't even speak the same language, when I logged in to the new account the whole thing was in Swedish or something like it.
So nothing at all linking the account to me, except a misspelled e-mail address. When I logged in, FB was happy to suggest I friend a whole bunch of people I know IRL. Including people that do not know the e-mail address used. Absolutely crazy. How were they able to link me to these people when I was signed in to a complete stranger's account?
Well I sort of did, didn't want to delete the guy's stuff, so I made a dummy gmail account, switched it to that and deleted the gmail account after weeks of spam emails and trying to contact facebook I figured he could do some of the hard work to get his account back.
Of course it backfired, after he stopped using his account facebook and a couple of weeks facebook started sending begging emails to my email account again (don't believe them when they say they delete anything), I still get the occasional "what you've missed on FB" emails and about once a year the guy tries to recover his account and I get an email, I'd drop him a note, but the only email address I have for him is mine
Facebook shouldn't be sending you those emails at all, to be honest, assuming you never clicked the verification button.
That said, clicking the "report spam" button should allow you to unsubscribe from such emails without dealing with logins or whatnot. Gmail supports certain unsubscribe headers that'll automate the process, which should make getting rid of Facebook's spam a lot easier.
The trouble is that Facebook doesn't know every email providers rules and which email addresses the email provider considers equivalent. So for Facebook, foo@gmail.com and f.o.o@gmail.com are two separate addresses (and indeed foo@hotmail.com and f.o.o@hotmail.com probably really are two separate addresses probably controlled by two different people).
You're right that if Facebook required the email to be verified (by sending an email to it) before it could be used with Facebook then two different people wouldn't be able to have two separate Facebook accounts with one of them having an email address controlled by someone else. However, Facebook, in order to "reduce friction" and "reduce time to first value" is happy for you to use an unverified email address and they're happy to send a variety of emails to that address (including lots of emails telling you to finally verify that address).
clicked register new account
Entered Name, DOB, Email
Now I'm stuck, can't proceed past "Enter the code from your email" and going to https://facebook.com in a new browser tab takes be back to the "enter code from email page".
I doubt they will send any chaser emails but I will report back in some time
I just did the same thing with the opposite behavior, you’re probably coming from a bad internet neighborhood. Facebook does a lot of reputation stuff in their login and onboarding flows.
I don't understand how someone could sign up for a site with f.o.o@gmail.com in this example. That person would never receive email from the site (like a confirmation), because the foo@gmail.com owner would receive the confirmation. Doesn't Facebook require confirmation before the account is created?
I have exactly the same problem, and it has made my gmail account almost unusable. I have at least 150 unwanted emails per day (80% of them get caught by the spam filter)
Bear in mind that since there are a lot of websites (hundreds at least), and you haven't signed up to all of them, you can end up getting emails from websites you didn't sign up for even, when you're not using Gmail. I doubt it makes this minor problem appreciably worse
It's a problem when using email to register into a different site. Services without email validation will happily accept those two addresses separately, because they don't adhere to Gmail's internal conventions. If the site then sends mail to its registered accounts, then the Gmail address will receive unwanted mail.
There are horrible people who loves the idea of being able to use someone else's identities. Not just made up but stolen. I - I don't want to know why, nor what they're normally thinking.
Will Gmail prevent you from entering such an address elsewhere, thinking either that it is yours, or that it is the email of some intended recipient other than the actual Gmail accountholder?
Alternatively: will third-party systems consolidate such addresses under a single account, or treat them as different?
You have to be a bit careful with that kind of argument though. According to the specs the local part of an email address (before the @) can also be case sensitive so me@example.com and ME@example.com could be different email addresses. In the early days of a new system we implemented account email addresses following what the rules really say and making no assumptions. We then spent way too much time dealing with users who signed up with one address but then tried to log in with a "different" one because they had caps lock on or some auto-capitalisation feature in whatever browser they were using. Lesson learned - users do assume those are all the same address and cleaning up a database that sometimes has accounts for both me@example.com and ME@example.com isn't much fun.
There is no RFC about how the local-part is interpreted: even the gmail +tag syntax is an extension some servers implement and some don't. The only way to accurately test equality of email addresses is to send an email to them.
Even that only tells you something about equality/equivalency (or more precisely, the deliverability) at this moment. I have a family mail server that we periodically update mail list and forwarding rules. You could test for deliverability today and tomorrow the situation could change.
Yes, I know, that's the whole point. The mistakes that most people (including yourself) are attributing to the dots, are actually usually caused by human carelessness -- spelling errors, mixing up gmail with hotmail, "dave" instead of "david" etc.
I made (and corrected) three further typos writing my correction.
But the point remains that what I'd originally intended to show was that local-part email addresses which read differently, and in cases quite differently, but are identical save for the location of the dot, are treated identically by Gmail.
And that in different contexts this might not be clear and/or lead to confusion.
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.
> Not for gmail though; gmail ignores those dots. But some.email@notgmail.com is normally a different inbox if the local part drops the dot.
My own mail server is configured to use a different character besides the `+` for tags and its notion of "same account" is defined by a mysql query. There's no way to know the interpretation of the local part in advance: you can apply various heuristics if you don't mind annoying people; or you can accept the email and verify it by sending an email.
Similarly, I configured my mail server to use the system "tag.user@domain". So you can't use the same heuristic as gmail, because if you try to do an untagged email, you likely just give the tag, which doesn't correspond to a user.
Drives me insane. And so many people and systems auto adjust addresses, produce almost mine, and then gmail delivers the random output. I once set up a google group to forward mail to.
One person is x.yz@gmail. Tens of times I’ve had people or systems strip the x, I am y.z and get their mail. Invites to funerals. Business mail. Admittedly reduced lately, he probably uses it less.
One professor has a “t” in his name, so “ytz”. People miss the t and send to yz. Dot gets ignored so I get those. I get assignments, or people pleading for extensions. That’s stopped over time.
The stuff is important so I tried hard to get it to the right person. But a bounce to the sender would have been better. It’s a bit wearying to be a post forwarder.
Most of the spam I get is to yz. Some makes it through. I’ve never used that version, ever. I just checked spam now. First 4 messages were to “yz”.
So many mistakes get sent to that version. After many years I tried setting a rule to block that version because it’s definitely not for me, but no go (although maybe that’s why I get less now of the above two examples. I’ll check my rules in the morning). I’ve had the address since the earliest intro-only days so it’s had time to add crud.
johndoe@gmail.com and john.doe@gmail.com are obviously two different addresses. At least for me. I don't see why the first one should receive mails from the second one.
They are two different addresses, think of the second as an alias to the first.
Google creates an alias for every possible combination of dotted email address to your primary.
If you don't want to use the feature, you don't have to. Lots of people find it extremely useful.
It wasn't always that way on gmail. I have a long-lived account and someone else has in the past had a working address of the same words without the dot but always used the @googlemail.com address.
Note: my bit of research into this taught me that the googlemail.com domain is used by Gmail users in Germany, Russia, and Poland where the Gmail trademark was already taken 1. In each case, Google was forced to use “googlemail” and therefore googlemail.com instead. As of 2012, the situation with Germany was straightened out and new users to Gmail there get assigned a gmail.com domain.
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.
This is a great reminder that Gmail ignores dots on the left side of the @ symbol, which means I am constantly getting e-mail for other people.
Which can create problems with services who don't consider them the same. A decade or so ago I had an awful time trying to sort out two of my Xbox Live accounts that only varied by the dot, and couldn't figure out why I was still being charged when my account page said it was canceled.
I don’t think this was always the case. I had two separate accounts around 2007ish. Separate passwords for each. <first>.<last>@gmail.com and <first><last>@gmail.com.
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.
I remember a Lotus Notes-based on in a bank I worked at the early 90's. I think it only stopped when the Chief of Staff did a reply-all with "The next person to reply-all to these emails is sacked."
I’ll never forget the day that there was pizza available on the 10th floor of corporate headquarters and an email sent to thousands of employees who do not work at headquarters.
I can only imagine the code that handles the previous and next buttons and the counter, with all the exceptions there probably are.
the next of 403 is correctly 405, which correctly has 403 as its previous.
-latest reply all on every reply-all storm.
In my early days at Amazon, around 2012-2015, this would happen frequently enough [0]. I pretty quickly learned the best thing to do was to ignore the conversation and never think about it again rather than try to 'help'.
[0] - too many new products and orgs set up new mailing lists with 5000+ people on it, most of whom had no idea what it was. Growing pains.