A different one than the article but also weird/dangerous, it (was? is still?) possible to manipulate someone else's contact identifiers.
This may have been fixed, but I stopped using gmail years ago so I'm not sure..
For example imagine Alice emails Bob and Chad, and in the To: field for Bob she gives Bob a different "Name" like "Brad" <bob@bob.com>. If Chad replies to this email, Bob will now be in his contact list as Brad. The email is still bob@bob.com but you can see how it could be malicious, or at least fodder for fun pranks.
I have a long history of emailing a particular dude, call him Greg. Greg's email address does not have any periods in it. Gmail ignores periods, yes, but many other clients don't, so I want to never type Greg's email with a period. Further, I want to be able to reliably grep and join my own email exports.
Upon buying a new phone I received an email from Frank, who cc'd Greg. Fucking Frank has Greg's email address with a period in it.
From now on, no matter what I do, my phone autocomplete's Greg's email address with a period. At first I manually fixed it every time, but at this point I've given up. Now I'm as bad as Frank. It's like this virus that goes from Frank to Frank polluting the data as it goes.
If my contacts are going to be changeable by other people can they at the very least ask me first? Greg is on Gmail, can Gmail not auto-switch Greg to his canonical email unless I specifically request it not to? If Greg is going to be changed, why on earth is it one way (the right way) in my web inbox and a completely different way in my phone?
This may have been fixed, but I stopped using gmail years ago so I'm not sure..
For example imagine Alice emails Bob and Chad, and in the To: field for Bob she gives Bob a different "Name" like "Brad" <bob@bob.com>. If Chad replies to this email, Bob will now be in his contact list as Brad. The email is still bob@bob.com but you can see how it could be malicious, or at least fodder for fun pranks.