I just received an email on my Gmail account. It was an odd email, apparently from Microsoft, but that’s another subject. As I often do with suspicious emails, I checked out the full headers, and the To: address was wrong. My Gmail address has a dot in it, and this address was dot-less. Next to the address was the comment:
(Yes, this is you. Learn more.)
So I clicked on the link, and this is what I read:
Am I receiving someone else’s email?
Google Mail does not recognise dots (.) as characters within a username. This way, you can add and remove dots to your username for desired address variations. Messages sent to your.username@googlemail.com and y.o.u.r.u.s.e.r.n.a.m.e@googlemail.com are delivered to the same inbox, since the characters in the username are the same.
Keep in mind that hyphens (-) and underscores (_) cannot be used in a Google Mail address. In addition, usernames are not case sensitive. Therefore, it does not matter if you enter upper case or lower case letters.
If you created your account with a dot in your username and you wish you had not, you can change your ‘Reply-to address’. To change your reply-to address:
- Click ‘Settings’ at the top of any Google Mail page.
- Enter your username@googlemail.com without a dot in the ‘Reply-to address’ field.
- Click ‘Save Changes’.
When you log in to Google Mail, you need to enter any dots that were originally defined as part of your username.
This seems utterly clueless to me. Not only does it ignore the spirit (if not the letter) of the relevant RFCs, it also violates the principle of least surprise. In every other email system that I know of, the strings “first.last@domain.com” and “firstlast@domain.com” represent different addresses. To Google, these are the same address. And they aren’t even consistent, as the final sentence makes clear.
Case-insensitivity is fine. After all, everything after the “@” in an address is case-insensitive, and we’ve got plenty of experience with Win/Mac file names. But ignoring punctuation? Of those folks who try adding or subtracting dots, how many will realize that it only applies to the left of the “@”, and only with Gmail? And just think of how many systems require you to use your email address as a username. I’m pretty sure that Amazon.com isn’t going to allow you to add random dots to your address when you log in….
I’m still thinking through the many different ways in which this sucks – with spam, digital signatures, inter-system forwarding, whitelisting/blacklisting schemes, etc. Once you screw with the identity function in any system, bad things are likely to follow.
Sorry, Google – you just lost about 6 INT points (and a couple of CHR as well). What a stupid design. Even though it will be a tedious chore, I think I’m going to dump my Gmail account and switch to Yahoo! – they allow punctuation characters and don’t mess around with them.