gmail is setup to ignore periods. So abcd@gm….. is the same ab.cd@gm…. which is in turn the same as a.b.c.d@gm….. The person who gets a gmail account using “abcd” will get all the mail for “abcd” and “ab.cd” and “a.b.c.d” and so on. However for a google account all characters are counted. So there can be an “abcd” an “ab.cd” an “a.b.c.d” google account. However all the associated email addresses will end up going to whoever whoever setup an account using only letters and numbers first.
It is a strange bug, and a bit hard to follow. I know this because I set up william.ove as a google account and got the william.ove and williamove and w.ill.iam.o.ve and all variant of that as my valid email address. A fellow at some point after me setup a williamove google account. And all of his his email comes to me. I tried to get this sorted out, but from what I gather there is nothing that can be done about it. Google had accounts before gmail, and when gmail was setup it had different rules and I gather by the time they caught it, it was too late to fix what had been done without causing horrid problems. At some point perhaps the rules for new accounts were changed.
In any event I get all his package delivery confirmations, actually all his is order confirmations and generally a big raft of garbage he signs up for. Of course I can not contact him because any email I sent to him, ends up in my inbox.
He signed up for Disney+. I know because I got the email, So I decided to mess with him a bit and went to account, asked for a password reset, which of course came to my inbox, and just took over the account. So I had Disney + for a couple days, when I got an email saying they were sorry I had cancelled my account.
Anyway I thought of it today, because I got an email confirmation because he had ordered some new clips from a gun shop for his AR15. I find some humor in that I am a quaker and not a fan of guns, while my namesake who I have never met (he lives in Oregan) appears to fittingly be my evil twin.