Slashdot Mirror
Gmail Mis.delivered?
An anonymous reader writes "Google doesn't make many mistakes but when it does, boy, are they doozies! The latest is that Gmail doesn't care about periods in usernames. So mail sent to anonymous.coward@gmail.com is also delivered to anonymouscoward@gmail.com, even though these are two separate mail accounts. Google admits Gmail doesn't see periods, but no word on a fix yet." Update: As may users have pointed out Ars has since corrected the story, stating that the original submitter was mistaken and the email was just improperly addressed.
I can't believe Google is disrespecting users with periods.
Since there is no word on a fix yet, it would be interesting if Microsoft rolls out a 3rd party patch which warns Gmail users when the recipient email address has periods in it.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
This couldv been a really neat feature.
I could signup a generic slashdot@gmail.com type account and then pass around multiple variations to different sites.
Depending upon the variation received I could determine which site leaked my mail.
I think the only way to rectify this is to start accounting for the period.
The cat is out of the bag so to speak.
liqbase
From what I understand, it's not two seperate accounts (i.e. ab@gmail.com and a.b@gmail.com are only one account and you can't register both, and you get mail that comes to either).
In addition, you can use it as a feature to filter mail. (i.e. if I'm abcdefg@gmail.com I can give out abcd.efg@gmail.com to friends and abc.defg@gmail.com to random websites, then filter the incoming mail automatically).
Feature, not a bug, in my opinion.
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
Bloopers like this make me check the calender, sounds like perfect April 1st Slashdot news.
It's a damn shame mikeroger doesn't have a racier life, it would be awesome.
Google's response, btw, was that I'd secured both mikeroger@gmail.com and mike.roger@gmail.com and could switch between the two as I wanted. Obviously, this is incorrect.
The bright side is I seem to have blown the original email user away w/volume; he used to receive about 1 email every 3 days as opposed to my 20-30 (not including spam).
The down-side is he subscribed to XM ENTERTAINMENT's porn newsletter.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
There is an update at the top of the article:
Update: Ryan Coleman has since admitted he was mistaken, and that the e-mails he received addressed to ryancolemand@gmail.com were misaddressed.
I wonder how many slashdot accounts, internet domains, and amazon accounts are linked via an @gmail.com address.
This is most certainly not a "little" problem by any means...
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
This has been known for a while in the user community. In fact, this tutorial is 18 months old, and demonstrates the "feature".
I have a friend from college that I met through a mistakenly delivered email. She was trying to send to someone with the email address like "rjm987@someotherschool.edu", but she accidentally put a space between the "m" and the "9", so the system delived it to one of my class accounts with the username "rjm". We became good friends and still email each other now and then, a decade later.
So, it can be a great way to meet new people!
I don't see the problem with that, I thought it was common knowledge. The way I see it, how often is a period essential, or dangerous? I don't think there are many domains with say, joesmith@domain.com and joe.smith@domain.com pointing to different people. I see the period as a way of reducing typing errors.
Also, you can do things like this:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answI don't want to sound trollish, but this hardly sounds like story material to me.
njord
The CB App. What's your 20?
This has been the case since day 1. The only problem is if Google has been allowing people to register addresses that differ only because of the position of periods. Certainly they generally don't - I've tried to register several variations of my gmail address without success. It looks like the case discussed in this article is a isolated incident.
The person made a mistake. He was getting someone elses mail for a different reason. You cannot make two account that are the same.
- found-in-my-inbox-odd.html
Here is his blog post saying he made the mistake.
http://fitrans.blogspot.com/2006/01/oops-formerly
Never Smoke A Banana.
Uhm... I just tried this. It doesn't work - you can't register username if user.name is taken, nor can you register user.name if username is taken.
they turned evil! It had to happen!
Just the other day, I was overjoyed that Google was fighting for my rights, now I'm dissapointed to learn that they're not fighting for women's rights too.
I can only imagine what Condoleezza Rice & Hillary Clinton will have to say about this.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
This explains why I've been getting email from some guy telling me I'm his lab partner in some class and that I need to contact him to get info on the final assignment. I wrote to him, "Who do you think I am and what class are you talking about?". He says, "I'm Quincy. I set next to you in IST 326. We have an assignment due soon!" I say, "Uh. I don't think so, since I'm not in any IST program. Are you sure you have the right email?" The guy: "Yes, daviddunlap@gmail.com, right?" Me: "No, not at all. david.dunlap@gmail.com." I thought all this time that the guy just didn't know how to use email. Boy, was I wrong.
Not much better place to embarrass yourself than on the front page of /. ... :)
you had me at #!
Headline here should be corrected; this isn't a huge gmail flaw; seasoned users know it as a feature.
Secret gmail feature #1: you can add and remove periods from your username with no change in mail routing. There is no collision with other accounts since only one account (stripped of periods) is allowed to exist.
Scret gmail feature #2: you can append a plus and any string to your account name and it will still be routed to you. Try creating filters by giving out your address this way: eg example+spam@gmail.com will be delivered to username 'example'
This is absolutely not mis-delivery or a mistake on Google's part!
e r=10313&query=dot&topic=0&type=f
See Gmail's Help page on this at:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answ
(You may need to be logged into Gmail account to see this.)
Simply put, the period only matters when logging in. Gmail considers some.user@gmail.com and somuser@gmail.com as the same when delivering email, but if the account was oopened as some.user, then you have to use some.user as the login--someuser will not work. Send an email to some.user@gmail.com, somuser@gmail.com, or so.me.us.er@gmail.com, and it'll get delivered to the same account, but you will only be able to login as some.user@gmail.com
Google's intent was to cut down on addressing mistakes as well as spam.
From the user's perspective, actually a good thing because it means that you "lock in" similar addresses so some.user and someuser aren't two different accounts. It also means that the actual number of accounts is less because of this.
-Jim
http://gmailtips.com/
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
You get mail? I've signed up for tons of stuff and nobody sends anything to my $sys$@gmail.com account.
For the life of me, I can't figure out why.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I read your Email.
What I said above is a complete and total lie. Instead of going by what other slashdot posters had posted (lies as well, apparently - who would've guessed?), I actually tried it out and it didn't work. The grandparent was correct. I couldn't register firstnamelastname@gmail.com when firstname.lastname@gmail.com was already registered.
:)
I guess I should actually put a little effort in research before spouting unsubstantiated bullshit. Or I can just take note from the editors of a certain tech-oriented website and continue on my merry, non-reaserching way
Oh please, it's rare that Google ever move from a beta version to a gold version.
Granted, officially it's a public beta, sadly very few treat it that way and rely on it for their primary email contact.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
It used to be possible to register both a no-dot and a dot name as two separate accounts, and the mail did mingle. Now it is no longer possible to register both (but mail going to a dot name will go to the no-dot name).
Someone must have a version of my G-Mail account with a period in it. Apparently, they're very into penis enlargement...
It is a G spot.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Remove this story, as it's total b.s. BTW it was posted on digg 3 days ago, by which time it had been identified as b.s. Way to go slashdot!
I don't know what this story is talking about, but the dot-ignoring delivery has been publicly known from day 1, and I just conducted the experiment of attempting to register a whole bunch of stupidly dotted variations on my username, and Gmail wouldn't let me register them.
So apparently they're doing the smart thing, and not including the dots when they do a uniqueness test on new usernames.
Maybe once upon a time in the very beginning they didn't, but I don't think that's the case now.
Google doesn't make many mistakes but when it does, boy, are they doozies
I'm not American and I'm not sure I understand. What is a "doozy" and should I be worried if I have one? I'm hoping it isn't the kind of thing I can catch just from using the internet.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
I tried it first as one message to two recipients, and it didn't work either.
Try sending it from an email account other that your gmail account, and don't send to both addresses from the same message (i.e. two recipients.) I send one message from my university account to first.last@gmail.com then a second separate message to firstlast@gmail.com and both arrived.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
Uh, as long as I've had Gmail (a few months since it came out), I have known about this, and it was said to be a FEATURE. You want to know how? Well, I created a filter that sends all email TO: firstlast@gmail.com to a spam label, and this way only people who email first.last@gmail.com (notice the period) will go to my inbox. It's a feature, much like the firstlast+tag@gmail.com. Some sites don't accept the +tag part though. So, in other words, sign up to websites that may spam you by using firstlast@gmail.com and it will be filtered to a spam label (if you set it up that way) but tell your friends your address is first.last@gmail.com. You could also do it vice-versa. Accept email only as firstlast@gmail.com but if an address has first.last@gmail.com, it is then marked as spam. If they "fix" this, I will be quite upset. I've been using it extensively. -Ares
Why is this article being left on the front page? It has been seen to be completely invalid, and is giving people the wrong idea. Great, you put a correction up, but the correction negates everything the article contains. Get rid of it.
What is this "Slashdot" you speak of? We only see a site called "Slash"
... and then they built the supercollider.
Anything sent to my email address with dots added NEVER gets to me.
My wife too. We both have very early gmail accounts (within the first month or so). Back in the early days, were different people allowed to sign up for different dot-variation names? If so, the obvious fix would have been to remove the dot functionality on those combinations to avoid having email sent to the wrong accounts. Which may be what happened with our accounts. That would suck if true, as missing this functionality is a big loss.
I experienced this first-hand. I was surprised to see a registration confirmation in my inbox for Lavalife when I have never even been to the site and already have a girlfriend. Awkward, to say the least. It let me log on to his acccount information, and it turns out he's a married guy in Australia looking for a little "fun" on the side. If I were as sneaky as him, he'd be in the doghouse for a few months...
So very true. In fact, this is the real reason why spammers do what they do - send out as much mails to as much people they can reach, in the hope to find that one true person in their life.
They even offer rewards in their emails! Such good people...
http://jcsnippets.atspace.com/ - a collection of Java & C# snippets
I hate to point this out to you, but you need a username before the "@" symbol. That could be why no one is sending anything. Hope this helps.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, however, there is.
We did confirm it, or so we thought we did. The e-mail delivery problem is there, if you choose to call it a problem. Mail sent to JoeSixpack will arrive at Joe.Sixpack, provided that those two GAs are not 2004-era accounts registered to different people. Some people think it's a feature, some don't.
As for the accounts mix-up, it looks as though it matters when you registered your account. As you can see from the /. discussion, a number of people ran in to GA accounts when
the service was still young. Now it won't let you register accounts with only a "." as a differentiator. It appears Google has fixed that aspect, but they are still delivering e-mail with the periods stipped out, which is how this was noticed in the first place.
"Google doesn't make many mistakes..."
;)
Well, see what Google suggests ("Did you mean...?") when you search on "landlords required to give heat"
I am not a number - I am a free man!
Gmail requires 6 characters before the @-symbol, so that's a lie.
The idea is nice however, I've been thinking about it for a while:
Most people nowadays prefix their email address with "SPAM". They consider it safer because spambots aren't that smart. Now, spambots auto-delete "spam" when it's in an email address.
So, what if you registered dascandyspam@gmail.com (for me) as normal email addy with dascandy@gmail.com as spam address?