I’ve heard a lot of confusion about Gmail and the routing of email to the wrong user account. I thought I’d repost this from the Gmail help section, to clear up confusions. It seems once you’ve managed to register an email address, no one else can register a variation containing different capitalization or periods (.) in the address.
Your address is similar but has more or fewer dots (.) or different capitalization.
Sometimes you may receive a message intended for someone whose address resembles yours but has a different number or placement of dots. For example, your address might be homerjsimpson@gmail.com, but the message was sent to a Homer.J.Simpson@gmail.com. What’s going on?
Gmail allows only one registration for any given username. Once you sign up for a particular username, any dot or capitalization variations are made permanently unavailable for new registration. If you created yourusername@gmail.com, no one can ever register your.username@gmail.com, or Your.user.name@gmail.com. Furthermore, because Gmail doesn’t recognize dots as characters within usernames, adding or removing dots from a Gmail address won’t change the actual destination address. Messages sent to yourusername@gmail.com, your.username@gmail.com, and y.o.u.r.u.s.e.r.n.a.m.e@gmail.com are all delivered to your inbox, and only yours.
If you’re homerjsimpson@gmail.com, no one owns Homer.J.Simpson@gmail.com, except for you. Sending mail to Homer.J.Simpson@gmail.com is the same as sending mail to homerjsimpson@gmail.com, or even HOMERJSIMPSON@GMAIL.COM. If you’re getting mail addressed to Homer.J.Simpson@gmail.com, most likely someone was trying to send a message to Homer.J.Sampson@gmail.com, or Homer.J.Simpson1@gmail.com, and made a mistake. You might even get messages from mailing lists or website registrations because the intended recipient accidentally provided the wrong email address. In these cases, we suggest contacting the original sender or website when possible to alert them to the mistake.
For security reasons, when you log in to Gmail, you must enter any dots that were originally defined as part of your username.
Note: Google Apps recognizes dots. If you’d like to receive mail with a dot in your username, please ask your domain administrator to add the desired username as a nickname.
One thought on “About Gmail and email addresses with dots (periods) in them..”
Hi Rob, Google claims this, but those of us who created accounts early on (2004) found that dots do matter, and others were able to create accounts with them.
I had a Gmail from 2004 that I forgot about till last week, when I found a note about it (it’s in the format of abcdef@gmail.com—just six letters). Logging in, I discovered 7,700 emails in there, mostly from email lists. Evidently people were able to create abc.def and abcd.ef, and in one case, abcgef, and somehow I can see a lot of their emails. These emails began coming in 2011.
Because they believed Google when they said the dots don’t matter, they went on and created accounts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as abcdef@gmail.com. Not only that, they were able to activate them and use them, which shouldn’t have been possible without access to my account. Odds are they can see my messages from their dotted accounts and vice versa.
What’s scary is how many people believe they have my email address. I count 20. I have full names for 10 of them. There are two Twitter accounts started by different people—I think one went dormant (and they were even able to change and confirm their handle a couple of times before that) and another person using my address set a new one up. I know it’s absolutely possible some of these people got it wrong as you suggest, but 20 is on the high side—and there are four social media users who definitely didn’t get it wrong.