I've had my primary gmail account since the days where you had to have an "invite" to register with them and just recently I've noticed an uptick of spam type messages making it into my inbox, including some legitimate messages, including one from a medical clinic that likely violated HIPAA of the intended recipient.

What seems to be happening is a different email account controlled by another person with the same name, has set up email forwarding from their account to mine.

my address is my first and last name together @gmail.com.

The account these emails are coming from is the same first and last name but with the addition of a period between the two names. That is not an account I have registered or have access too.

I realize I can just block that account but I am wondering if there is a better option than that to actually break the association?

Maybe reply to them and point this out? If it's some sort of phishing exercise just ignore whatever happens next, but if it's a legit mistake they will correct.

I have this same issue. I get a lot of a guy in Ohio's very private and sensitive emails because his wife doesn't know his email address (I know this because I was finally able to get ahold of them when I started getting their mortgage documents and they were wondering why they weren't getting signed.) Still didn't change anything as I still get his stuff and she still uses his wrong email address when she signs him up for stuff.

The problem is Gmail doesn't recognize periods in their email address. Joe.Smith@gmail.com is the same as Joesmith@gmail.com is the same as j.o.e.s.m.i.t.h@gmail.com.

Overall it's nice to own your name, but it doesn't help when:
a. legitimate people don't know their email address.
b. random spammers send emails out to random name combinations and some end up routed to you.

look at this link for more info

It may be that some places with which the name-with-period individual registered their email address either missed the period (if it was given verbally), or the software they're using removed it from the email address. (I actually had one system do that with a tagged email address I gave them, converting username+tag@example.com to usernametag@example.com.)

I would attempt to email the individual in question regarding the apparently legitimate ones.

quote:

Originally posted by Perception:
The problem is Gmail doesn't recognize periods in their email address. Joe.Smith@gmail.com is the same as Joesmith@gmail.com is the same as j.o.e.s.m.i.t.h@gmail.com.

That seems highly unlikely to me. Do you have some proof of this?

ETA: I'll be damned. You're right. I just tested it. That's totally brain-dead

If GMAIL doesn't recognize periods within an address then why would they register both?

Seems they created the problem and a big one at that, IMO.

quote:

Originally posted by smschulz:
If GMAIL doesn't recognize periods within an address then why would they register both?

Seems they created the problem and a big one at that, IMO.

They sure did. That's just broken. Not just a little >< broken, either. That's badly broken.

quote:

Originally posted by ensigmatic:

quote:

Originally posted by smschulz:
If GMAIL doesn't recognize periods within an address then why would they register both?

Seems they created the problem and a big one at that, IMO.

They sure did. That's just broken. Not just a little >< broken, either. That's badly broken.

While it's definitely monumentally dumb that they don't recognize periods, they say that they won't allow you to register different versions:

quote:

Originally posted by BamaJeepster:
While it's definitely monumentally dumb that they don't recognize periods, they say that they won't allow you to register different versions:

It's great they do that, but, not only is it monumentally dumb, but it's a violation of the email RFCs. (RFCs define the various Internet standards.)

The only punctuation they ought to be parsing for the purposes of delivery is the "+" sign, which is used for recipient email tagging.

<looks to make sure he's on firm footing...>

Ok, I'm not correct on the above. If I'm reading the relevant RFCs correctly, mail systems can now use whatever they want for "user:detail" separators? It's not limited to "+"?

Still: I don't believe it's RFC-compliant to simply remove "."s from email addresses and deliver to the result.

quote:

Still: I don't believe it's RFC-compliant to simply remove "."s from email addresses and deliver to the result.

You can tweet Sundar Pichai and let him know LOL

Link

GMail, and many other e-mail providers, treat a dot (.) in the user portion of the e-mail address as an optional character, it does not affect the mailbox to which the message is directed. So the addresses fname.lname@gmail.com and fnamelname@gmail.com are equivalent (within the frame of reference represented by GMail). And yes, Google did allow registration of both "usernames" at one time, although the last I checked this was no longer the case. IIRC, MS365 also ignores a dot in the username, but has never allowed "dual" registration. One of my customers had a policy that staff maintained addresses of this form on their internal mail server (Postfix+Cyrus IMAP), worked fine. The users started getting non-corporate email accounts and, of course, they wanted the same user name. All hell broke loose before we understood the issue. WRT the issue of "RFC compliant," it has been a few decades since I researched this issue, but I believe it is not addressed in RFC-822 (which originally defined the syntax of an Internet e-mail message headers), but was revised and addressed in RFC-5322 where is is explicitly allowed, with a notation that treatment as a separator (or choosing to ignore it) is up to the recipient. Note that addresses that are sent to ALL-CAPS are usually treated similarly.

Generally speaking, using punctuation characters in an e-mail address is poor practice. This is because these characters often have "special" meaning to the e-mail software (or legacy e-mail routing), and/or the operating systems on which e-mail systems run. The sole exception is the "+" character which can be quite useful as noted by my learned colleague above. An address of the form myname+folder@some.server.host will often be deposited in inbox/folder on myname's account (depending on the mail server software used, and how it is configured, most of the widely-used server software packages understand and honor this syntax). It is not the case that punctuation characters are not allowed, but that, if used, they must be quoted using a mechanism understood by the recipient (server, not user).

And remember, "e-mail address" and "account" are not the same thing, one being a message destination the other being an authentication token/identifier. There is no reason, other than for the convenience of the user, and the poor over-worked system administrator for them to hold the same value.

ok, so I was wrong in my assessment of what is going in... It isn't that mail is being forwarded from the fname.lname@gmail.com account, it is that the account doesn't really exist as Google says it is the SAME account as my fnamelname@gmail.com

Soooooo, there isn't anything to be done except to contact the senders of the legitimate emails to have them change their on-file address and block the rest of the emails as they come in.

Ah....the Google Dot deal.

Most of the Covid-19 fraud was done with this technique.