Have Cnet always been this rubbish?

AlmightyCushion

Just seen this article on Cnet.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13880_3-57587479-68/the-perils-of-a-generic-gmail-address/

The author seems to think that because ignores the dots in their email addresses that you can receive other people's mail. E.g if my gmail account is username@gmail.com I can receive emails for the person using user.name@gmail.com. The thing he doesn't realise is that gmail ignores the dots during the registration process too. So, once I register username@gmail.com, no one can register user.name@gmail.com or u.sername@gmail.com.

This is such a basic mistake to make, it makes you wonder what other stuff they miss out on or get completely wrong.

BobbyPropane

AlmightyCushion wrote: »

Just seen this article on Cnet.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13880_3-57587479-68/the-perils-of-a-generic-gmail-address/

The author seems to think that because ignores the dots in their email addresses that you can receive other people's mail. E.g if my gmail account is username@gmail.com I can receive emails for the person using user.name@gmail.com. The thing he doesn't realise is that gmail ignores the dots during the registration process too. So, once I register username@gmail.com, no one can register user.name@gmail.com or u.sername@gmail.com.

This is such a basic mistake to make, it makes you wonder what other stuff they miss out on or get completely wrong.

I have an email with a dot like user.name@gmail.com i was unable to get the word without the dot. I have gotten mail twice addressed to username@gmail.com and another similar name.

Phibsboro

BobbyPropane wrote: »

I have an email with a dot like user.name@gmail.com i was unable to get the word without the dot. I have gotten mail twice addressed to username@gmail.com and another similar name.

Quite an interesting article! What he appears to be actually saying is that while he recognises that Google ignored the punctuation, he'd prefer if they didn't! He then darkly hints that he doesn't necessarily believe Google when they say that the reason another persons real name can appear beside his email address in the To field of a misaddressed email is because the errant sender has that real name against that email address in their contacta list. But he offers no proof against this and then seems to suggest that really it's just people who don't filly understand the situation who might be confused.

OP is certainly right in that Google does not makea distinction between the same address with and without added punctuation. For bobby, I wonder whether he tried to get the name without punctuation before or after he registered the name with punctuation? If it was after then of course it would say it was taken because it's taken by you! You own every punctuated version of your original address. You prove this by sending yourself an email to the unpunctuated address.

As for the contacts thing, that should be easily testable, in going to try it now...

Phibsboro

Sure enough it happens exactly as Google says, if I create a new contact with a spurious name on my phone for an unpunctuated version of my email address and send an email to that address, the email arrives to me, as I would expect, and includes the spurious name in brackets in the To field. So it works exactly as Google told him, the main stupidity shown in the article is that he didn't take two minutes to test it himself!