alt Hacker NewsI have a first.last email, but it's created quite the interesting situation. Turns out some dude in Australia has the same first+last name as me, and he's been using [email protected]. As far as I can find from Google's documentation, the email with no dots should be the primary and the one with dots an alias, but I'm guessing because I registered mine ages ago (back in 2006) it takes precedence. I have no idea how he hasn't noticed that his gmail emails are going to another inbox - maybe Google delivers them to us both or something? Regardless, I've gotten very personal emails (like from his therapist) and tried to reach out explaining the situation and asked these parties to let him know he needs to stop using that email, but to no avail.
Honestly the one who is at fault here is Google. If first.last and firstlast are treated as aliases, they straight up should not allow people to create them once the first exists, rather than just send emails to someone else. I've tried to respect my Australian brother's privacy (like not reading his therapist's emails and such), but not everyone is gonna do that.
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Are you sure he actually has that address? I get lots of emails mistakenly sent to me, some via a dotted version of my address, but I'm pretty sure those people (or the ones trying to contact them) have just misremembered or typoed their actual address. I'd be very surprised if Google did allow firstlast and first.last to exist as distinct addresses tied to separate acccounts.
He has a different address than yours and has given out an incorrect version to some people (perhaps a misspelling of his name).
The dots are ignored.
I have this same issue! But I can log in with or without dots… but it’s like someone else thinks their email is my email without the dots. I can’t really figure out what is happening. The volume is way too high for it to be spam though.
If Im not mistaken, periods are ignored entirely. I regularly sign up for free trials with variations on [email protected], [email protected], f.i.r.s.t.last, etc and they all come to my inbox.
Oh god I have this problem with my [email protected] address. I have a common english name so get the emails of other people from all over the world. The worst are subscriptions and regular invoices.
I had to give up using the address.
I have exactly the same issue (I get an insane amount of email for other Firstname Surname people that isn't me from various other places in the world), but I'm 100% sure at this point that it's people using the wrong email address, as occasionally when I contact the people to let them know they've emailed the wrong address, they have actually told me the real email address they should have used, and they were missing a number, or in one case it should have been an initial instead of the full first name.
I used to also think that Google were screwing up by allowing a 'clash' of firstname.surname and firstnamesurname, and maybe they did a bit in the 2004-2009 period, but with lots of testing over the years (sending test emails to both), I'm confident now it's 'just' other people's emails getting 'simplified' too much when being told, and it ends up being sent to me.
I do however think Google shouldn't have allowed that alias situation to arise.
I also think (based on the fact that my 'un-dotted' email alias has been successfully used to sign up for various services for the other people) that many online services just have very poor sign-up validations of emails.