Why Gmail Might Be to Blame for Sean Conner Getting Emails for Other Sean Conners
Gmail might partially be to blame for receiving emails from other Sean Conners
Sean Conner, who snagged [email protected] early, explains how Gmail's policy of ignoring periods in usernames causes occasional email mix-ups. He shares a Lobsters thread full of similar stories and a damning Stack Exchange answer from another early adopter, arguing Google's explanation is flawed and that the confusion is real. Conner also dives into which ASCII characters are actually allowed in email addresses, noting that surprisingly few are forbidden.
The most disturbing thing to me is Google's insistence that they could not have made a programming mistake when they clearly did.
- Lazare
I'm a bit skeptical Google ever treated `[email protected]` and `[email protected]` 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 `[email protected]`, 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.
- dublinben
My Gmail account is old enough that I needed a beta invite from a cooler friend. As a cool kid myself, I registered a name full of punctuation. For decades Google has treated the punctuated and unpunctuated addresses as one and the same. There is no distinct Google account that can be access via one username or the other.
- smallerize
Both this post and the quoted one seem to be confused. Adding periods to a Gmail address never ever, since day one, went to a different mailbox.
I would like to see some of the evidence that two different people are logging in to accounts that are only different by periods.
- Semaphor
As others said, I also believe this post to be wrong. There is simply no evidence of the double account thing. But as we are all now talking about incorrect gmail mails…
I paid 1.4€ or something on ebay back then for an invite and got a very common [email protected], I’ve gotten everything, invoices, investment information, medical data, private photos, etc., though it has been getting better in the last few years, besides boring transactional mails and account recovery etc, I now only get such mails once or twice a year, used to be a monthly occurrence. Probably helped that I always wrote back and corrected those people ;)
- Kurd
I’ve been using Gmail since the first day it became available back in April 2004. I have [email protected]. My name is two syllables, and I specifically remember using another invite to try to register [email protected]. Google wouldn’t let me because it said the address was already registered.
I’m pretty sure the ignore the dot rule has always been there.