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Comment by xvxvx | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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...

Unfortunately, for me the example emails given in that answer get redacted by an injected Cloudflare script

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.

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

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.

That is the claim, yes.

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

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