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

ddmarto about 3 hours ago 28 commentsRead Article on boston.conman.org

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Lazare•34 minutes ago

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.

NoMoreNicksLeft•16 minutes ago

My email is fname.m.lastname@. My last name starts with a vowel. There is another surname that is mine with a leading consonant which happens to be my middle initial.

There is an older man, late 60s I think, with that name. I receive his email at least once a month. I have received sensitive emails, and I could no doubt perform some sort of computer fraud with those. He is not forgetting his email and putting a period in between the first letter of his name and the rest of it.

The Google ecosystem is vast. Somewhere within that ecosystem is one or more components that strips and/or ignores the dots, and for that split second his email and mine are identical.

smallerize•about 2 hours ago

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.

margalabargala•44 minutes ago

It's always since day 1 been gmail's stance that this was intended behavior.

From the various reports, including by people aware of gmail's stance, gmail may have had a bug allowing it at some point.

dhosek•about 1 hour ago

I doubt that there are likely cases of people having joe.smith@gmail.com and joesmith@gmail.com as distinct accounts, but I would note that for other domains hosted via gmail, in my experience, joe.smith@example.com and joesmith@example.com, say, would be treated as distinct mailboxes.

dublinben•about 2 hours ago

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.

pjot•about 1 hour ago

I used to love watching the “unlimited” storage counter increase as each second went by

1123581321•44 minutes ago

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.

paul7986•6 minutes ago

For almost 20 years i have received Ryan Spahn, an actor (his partner is Michael Urie of Ugly Betty & Apple TV's Shrinking) emails as we have the same name and very close Gmail addresses. I have received party invites, limo pick up details, gift card from his mom in law, movie tickets and tons of other personal things that at times make me panic like new airfare chargers for an airliner i flew on a month prior or 1800-flower invoices which i did business with them previously. I have called these businesses once or twice but now just ask him if this was his transaction.

13hours•28 minutes ago

How do you find them? I also get there emails and would love to at least let them know

Semaphor•about 1 hour ago

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 ;)

Kurd•about 1 hour ago

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.

jaggederest•about 1 hour ago

Yep, same here, since the beginning, I have a lot of people trying to email me at firstnamelastname instead of firstname.lastname and it's always badly addressed email, especially as there's someone who uses firstnamelastnameinitial, which is kind of a nightmare.

They've always had the "ignore the dot" semantics and it's sometimes even useful for testing, same as the plus-for-tagging.

On the plus side I did manage to save a name-cousin's immigration application one time when it went to spam on my account, I though that was a pretty interesting experience.

I also don't think google will let you actually register a new account without the dot, so the privacy leakage is much smaller than you might imagine.

kenny11•about 2 hours ago

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.

xvxvx•about 2 hours ago

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?

tredre3•about 2 hours ago

Two comments on the referenced stackexchange [1] claim that very early gmail accounts with and without dots were distinct. But searching the web, and reluctantly asking AI, I can find no reference to this so I believe they are mistaken.

According to Google themselves dots never mattered, not even in 2004.

1. https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/14668/why-does-g...

jb1991•about 2 hours ago

The two email addresses that you mentioned are for the same account. Google has always ignored the periods. You can actually put those periods anywhere you want. You will get all emails to all variations of that address.

matherial•about 2 hours ago

There's no other account. The period is disregarded. When you sign up for foo.bar@, you effectively get foobar@ and all the other variations (foob.ar@, etc). No one else can sign up for these. Quirky but not terribly interesting.

xvxvx•about 2 hours ago

That was my understanding all these years. Glad it’s still true.

Lazare•33 minutes ago

That is the claim, yes.

But no evidence has been presented, and it feels very unlikely to me.

arjie•about 2 hours ago

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.

thepace•about 1 hour ago

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.

netsharc•12 minutes ago

It's not Google's issue, it's (other) user error, those folks think their address is x, although x belongs to you instead.

badc0ffee•about 2 hours ago

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.

joshchaney•41 minutes ago

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.

kg•about 2 hours ago

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.

smallerize•about 2 hours ago

Is it possible that the recruiter set up a faulty reply-to header, instead of sending from your email address?

protocolture•about 1 hour ago

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.