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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.