Specifically she is receiving emails for <first name><middle
<last name>@gmail.com (no dots) when her email address is really
<same first name>.<same middle initial>.<same last name>@gmail.com (dots).
I don't know if this is a "feature" or a "bug", but either way, it's disquieting my wife. (Unhappy wife = unhappy life.)
I view this as both non-RFC compliant behavior -and- a potential security risk. (Registering a GMail account as <someone><famous>@gmail.com (no dot) to capture email for <someone>.<famous>@gmail.com (dot) emails.)
Please reply or email me directly at gtaylor (at) tnetconsulting (dot) net for additional details.
RFC 5321 says that the interpretation of the local-part in the address is
entirely up to the recipient host, so it's hard to imagine how this would
not be RFC compliant.
In practice, you can't fix stupid, so if your wife is feeling charitable,
she can write back and tell people she's not the guy they're looking for,
or else she can just report it all as spam. If she writes back, be prepared
for people to insist that she must be the person they intended to write to.
My gmail address is my name, and my name is fairly common, so I get all sorts
of mail, including mail from a car dealer in Phoenix who was just sure that I
wanted to buy a car from him even though I live in upstate New York.
Gmail will strip out periods. So it's not like there was some OTHER email
address that your wife is suddenly getting. There is only her address. Dots
or No Dots. Your wife's email address IS THE SAME as the dotless-version.
Okay ... so someone is sending to the incorrect email address that is a variant of my wife's GMail address.
The real annoying part is that someone used my wife's email address (sans dots) as their email address on Match.com. So my wife is now receiving all the notifications that are meant to go to that other person.
Specifically she is receiving emails for <first name><middle
><last name>@gmail.com (no dots) when her email address is really
<same first name>.<same middle initial>.<same last name>@gmail.com (dots).
I don't know if this is a "feature" or a "bug", but either way, it's
disquieting my wife. (Unhappy wife = unhappy life.)
*sigh*
So this is a non-RFC compliant ""feature.
*headshake*
Does anyone have any Match.com contacts? I'll try going that route to get the messages stopped. (Including emailing postmaster@ and abuse@ to see if they can help.)
Set up a filter in the GMAIL console to match (pun intended) the "Match"
emails and filter them into their own label. Then, hide that label. Don't
delete them though. You might have a gold mine there. Think of the
comedic relief you could provide others with " www.My-wife-keeps-getting-sent-pics-of-some-guys-tiny.org" You could post
the emails, the profile names of the pervs, etc. Sort of like a 20/20 "To
catch a..." only instead of predator, it would be perv.
Have your wife log in while omitting the dots, using e.g. "janeqpublic"
instead of "jane.q.public" as the username. She'll see there's only
one account, and it's her's, and that someone just typed the wrong
address.
Most likely reason: gmail is so common that someone mistypes johnsmith@example.com as johnsmith@gmail.com, not paying attention to
what they're doing. It happens.
This is what I was going to suggest. Have your wife login to the match.com
site (using the forgot password feature),
and then just deactivate / delete the account.
Or as other have pointed out, gmail filters with hidden labels or direct to
spam also works great.
Nope. The LHS of an email address *is system defined*; no one outside of
the destination mailserver is permitted to make any assumptions about it.
RFC5322 3.4.1:
"""
The local-part portion is a domain-dependent string. In addresses,
it is simply interpreted on the particular host as a name of a
particular mailbox.
"""
Note that using a "real name" as an email address is Not The Best Idea:
More likely, I think, is that newbies think that email addresses already exist for everyone on the planet at firstlast@gmail.com, and they just give that when asked (maybe they think it's throwaway and never actually expect to get any email there). I'm in the same boat. It doesn't bother me all that much because gmail is not my primary mail service. I use it to store big stuff that's clogging the mail service I do pay for. In fact, it can be entertaining, as I get usernames and passwords for sites that this guy signed up for. He's also a poker player and has recently tried to enroll at an art college. The latter I could reply to and explain that their prospective student is an idiot and should not be accepted, but that's what will happen anyway if I don't say anything.
Related oddness: if you're British and a GMail user, you either got a gmail.com username before the lawsuit, or you got a googlemail.com
between the lawsuit and the point when Google and the owner of the
"gmail" trademark settled, or then you got a gmail.com again.
Google chose to alias googlemail.com and gmail.com addresses so as to
minimise the mess, but this doesn't stop people who have googlemail.com entering gmail.com (or vice versa) when they set up an
account on www.somewebsi.te, because they are conditioned to use gmail.com/googlemail.com interchangeably, and then being baffled as to
why firstname.lastname@googlemail.com (or vice versa)/password1234
doesn't work, because googlemail==gmail and anyway my address is
really firstname.lastname@gmail.com (or googlemail) - look, I get
email on it, it must be the right one
