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imagine that you have an address name.surname@gmail.com

imagine that someone else has an address namesurname@gmail.com

this is very similar case to my mom's one. she constantly gets emails meant for someone else - including PII - because she has no dot in email, but the other party has a dot.

I know for sure that her's account is quite old one.




> imagine that you have an address name.surname@gmail.com

> imagine that someone else has an address namesurname@gmail.com

If gmail ignores dots, it shouldn't be possible to have name.surname and namesurname as two separate gmail accounts.


>because she has no dot in email, but the other party has a dot

And that's exactly the issue Gmail solves by ignoring dots. There cannot be two different accounts differing by dot(s).


Not for gmail though; gmail ignores those dots. But some.email@notgmail.com is normally a different inbox if the local part drops the dot.


> Not for gmail though; gmail ignores those dots. But some.email@notgmail.com is normally a different inbox if the local part drops the dot.

My own mail server is configured to use a different character besides the `+` for tags and its notion of "same account" is defined by a mysql query. There's no way to know the interpretation of the local part in advance: you can apply various heuristics if you don't mind annoying people; or you can accept the email and verify it by sending an email.


Similarly, I configured my mail server to use the system "tag.user@domain". So you can't use the same heuristic as gmail, because if you try to do an untagged email, you likely just give the tag, which doesn't correspond to a user.


that makes no sense, Gmail ignores the dot so both those email addresses are the same and can only belong to one person.

if you register namesurname@gmail.com, then you also every combination of it with a dot.

n.amesurname@gmail.com

na.mesurname@gmail.com

nam.esurname@gmail.com etc..




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