Gmail might partially be to blame for receiving emails from other Sean Conners

kg

I experienced this periodically on my gmail and always assumed that it was just a typo on the part of the sender, adding a period where there shouldn't be one. But there were cases that kind of defied plausibility, like when a recruiter (sharing my name but not my gmail address) sent out a mass cold email and I got the angry replies. I never figured out how that one happened, maybe they misconfigured their mailer software's replyto? I never once considered that a gmail bug or intentional design decision could be at work there. TIL that they decided to cut down on the confusion by normalizing addresses.

xvxvx

I have a firstname.lastname@gmail account and sometimes get emails for firstnamelastname@gmail too. Mostly, it’s accounts being setup using that address then ending up in my mailbox. I assumed they were typos but, if I’m reading this blog correctly, is Google leaking emails from the other account into mine? If that the case, I’m pretty alarmed, as I use my Gmail for a lot of my accounts. Back to Hotmail, I guess?

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.

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.

arjie

Yeah people sometimes set the recovery email. I always assume it’s an attempt at setting up some kind of trail relating their fraudulent account with mine in an effort to take it over through some later social engineering attack on an engineer somewhere and I always delink it. There shall be none but mine on mine. I have received since day one, 2005 emails at my address meant for others. Their pay stubs, their tax forms, the prospectus for the apartments they want. If I feel like it, I warn them. If I don’t, it goes to the ether. That’s life. Sucks that you won’t get your loan. Or notice that your bank needs you to fill in a form.

kenny11

I also have a firstname.lastname@gmail address from many years ago and quite often get emails for about five different people (based on the real-world location info in them). It seems that most of these are really sent to firsnamelastnamenumbers@gmail and somehow the number(s) get truncated by the sender, leading to firstnamelastname@gmail which then gets routed to me.

badc0ffee

You can have a space in an email address. On a project I was working on at a company I was at in 2003, I had to fix our support for that a number of times because that's what one of our customers had.

Kurd

I’ve been using Gmail since the first day it became available back in April 2004. I have firstname@gmail.com. My name is two syllables, and I specifically remember using another invite to try to register first.name@gmail.com. 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.

protocolture

I remember IBMs domain system being particularly well designed to ensure emails didnt go to the right place. I used to cop a lot of emails intended for first.last@ca.ibm.com to first.last@au.ibm.com. Senders got lazy, selecting the top most user alphabetically from the list, and then I popped up and just... never changed their behavior or habits. Would have been less concerned if the canuck version of me wasn't embedded in like a bank or something, and I was embedded with a completely different customer account. Took it to management when I got "Hey are we good for the firewall to come down ahead of the pentest to <bank> next week" and they did nothing about it lmao.

thepace

I have also been getting email in my Gmail account which are clearly unrelated to me. Some are very sensitive, related to bank account and mortgage. Tried letting google know with no success.

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 first.last@gmail.com, 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 ;)

1123581321

As others said, this post is wrong. I’m another owner of first.last/firstlast since 2004. There was never a period where Google got the dots wrong. People will forget their middle initial in their email (or others won’t notice it), or they’ll add firstlast as a recovery email or something. Receiving other people’s email never stops being funny to me. Some of them are grumpy about it (especially the one who paid for and distributed “thousands” of poorly designed business cards.) More have a sense of humor, and I’ve enjoyed getting to know a few of the other guys with the name over the years.

joshchaney

This blog is wrong. Other Sean Conners are to blame for not knowing their own email address. I know this because every other first initial j, last name chaney on this planet is a moron. I get Jennifer's receipts, Justin's bills, John's rent-2-own upcoming bill notifications, and hundreds more. Please. Make. It. Stop.

Lazare

I'm a bit skeptical Google ever treated `fname.lname@gmail.com` and `fnamelname@gmail.com` 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 `fnamelname@hotmail.com`, 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.