Google’s gmail people aren’t really as smart as they think they are.
That Another John Doe never, ever had access to johndoe@gmail.com, they just gave a wrong address. That's not gmail's fault.
I signed up for my university's email forwarding for alumni early on and got my first name as my email. For quite a while, I would get emails, including fairly sensitive ones, sent to me by not yet very email savvy people just assuming you could send an email to someone's first name and it would get to them.
I received 2-3 personal emails, but most of them are automated invoices.
This. My wife and I have two flavors of this.
Her address is firstmlast@gmail.com. There people frequently forget the m initial and somebody else owns firstlast@gmail.com She's since started using dots first.m.last to mitigate the error.
My address is firstlast@gmail, where first and last are not globally common, but are fairly common in Scotland. Once a year or so, I receive email for somebody else that shares my name. I don' know his real email, but I've been "invited" on his family vacations 3-4 times now. Infrequent enough that I just respond "thanks for the invite, but I think you'll be disappointed when I arrive and not the Alistair you were expecting."
It's actually not a super common first and last, so firstlast@ knows when to who to forward.
Nobody else can register an email that is the same as yours but without a dot. So the only way you receive someone else's email is if they give the wrong address.
That's not my experience. Which non-gmail email software ignores dots before the @?
Thinking about this, I guess the sending MTA doesn't care about dots; it goes RCPT TO: <address.with.dots@example.com>. The receiving MTA then has to validate that address; it does that using some account database that isn't typically part of the MTA - it could be a unix account (no dots!), a database table, or an LDAP user. Finally it passes the mail off to a delivery agent, which hopefully relies on the same account database.
So the elision of dots appears to be a feature of certain account databases. So which account databases elide dots?
[0] https://www.postfix.org/ADDRESS_REWRITING_README.html#virtua...
I guess this is another falsehood people believe about emails.
> Nobody else can register an email that is the same as yours but without a dot.
It used to be possible, then google decided to stop allowing that (guess why?)
And by the way, that’s an arbitrary decision.
I have run mail servers and it’s just and cam tell you… it’s an arbitrary decision.