Gmail addresses are not unique
 

There is a person with the same first and last names as me and with the same gmail address.
I found out when an acquaintance sent an email to my wife and copied me on it. I never got the email. The other Patrick did, and responded to “all.” Mrs WD came to me, perplexed, and asked why I responded in French, when I don’t even speak French.
I responded a kind of “WTF?” Email back to him. He responded, this time in English. Turns out the guy is a photographer working in Africa. We traded web site addresses and he is a legit professional photographer with my name and my gmail address. He was born in Straussburg which is 80km from Neuburg, the town my family came from - we may be related.
I have no idea how or why an email sent to me got delivered to a French guy in Africa, or why two people from Alsace were given the same Irish name.

I find it hard to believe that you have the EXACT same address. No hyphens or underscores? When you chose your Gmail address, they look for same addresses already in use

yeah, that shouldnt happen...

Maybe some hidden character or something? I don’t know, looking at the addresses on the screen they look the same.

They are not the same, and someone is trying to mine personal information about you. Tell them nothing. This is a phishing attempt.

If so he isn’t very persistent. He wrote to me once, over a year ago.

Ah, the luck of the Irish. Imagine that, someone to get all your spam.

Gmail does not recognize periods although IIRC way back in the day it may have allowed my.name@gmail.com and myname@gmail.com to register accounts individually.

Used to be a way for hackers to steal accounts as mail sent to m.y.n.a.m.e@gmail.com will go to myname@gmail.com

I didn't know that!!!!

I've been using my address as lastname.firstname@gmail.com for all these years without knowing that!

At the binary level, there must be a difference between the two....it might not even be an intrepretable character for us maroons to see however...just a WAG ;)

Well, this is an odd story.

First I've heard of it.

Thanks for sharing.

They cannot be identical, else both of you would get all of both y'all emails.

It's a technical impossibility to thave the same adress between 2 people and not see all emails sent to both. At least not on the internet with SMTP routing.

It would take seperate networks, like in a company network that does not route to the outside world.. but that is a thing of the past these days.

All allowed addressing characters and their use are described in

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2822

But in any case

Stijn.vandamme@domain.com

stijnvandamme@domain.com

stijn vandamme@domain.com < Not allowed
"stijn vandamme"@domain.com > ALLOWED
Stijn..vandamme@domain.com < Not allowed
"Stijn..vandamme"@domain.com > ALLOWED


But, only a stupid Admin will allow spaces and other weird sjit on his server because it can only cause problems and confusion down the line
Even the forum get's all annoyed and tries to add "email" tags and then fails on the spaces

Note, none of it is caps sensitive
so
STIJNVANDAMME@domain.com
is exactly the same as
stijnvandamme@domain.com
or
StIjNvAnDaMmE@domain.com


Then Gmail was not complying to the RFC.. But i fail to see how there is a security problem with that.
IF Gmail consistently ignores the dot and does not allow it in the creation of the account
Then no accounts will have a dot.

So if at that point somebody sends an email, and adds a dot... And Gmail parses the dot out, to end up with the non dot version.
Why would there be a problem?

Any email to stijn.vandamme@gmail.com would end up in the stijnvandamme@gmail.com mailbox
and when the user replies, it will be from stijnvandamme@gmail.com since gmail doesn't do dots.

How would a hacker in that way get access to the account? the password is still there.
You can't login to the mailbox without it.

The only way I can see an issue, if at some point they did allow a . in the adress but not in their routing.
Which would be a bit of a split brain problem and then you supposedly could get the mails to change routing, if the target has a dot, and you slip in with the same adress without a dot.

But that sounds a bit rich to me.. It would be epic retard level at Gmail if they did that.

This has been known for a long time. There are a lot of ways that you can manipulate a gmail address. Here is a Google blog post from 2008 that provides some of the ways this can be done.
https://gmail.googleblog.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-more-from-your.html

IIRC the issue was usernames, they allowed it on account creation so your.name and yourname were seen as unique accounts.

And the issue was not getting access to gmail, it was every account / service you used that gmail address with.

We all know email address lists get stolen 24/7.

So parse the list for any gmail addresses containing names with periods.

Now create a new account without the period and you will get the original accounts mail.

Forgot your username, we’ll send it to your email on file.

Forgot your password, we’ll send a reset link to your email on file.

These days when you try to create a new gmail address with a period in it gmail actually pops up text in red that says someone already has that username and that gmail ignores periods.

I would not bother googling that **** up because, well, gmail is google, as we know.

But trust me, this was a thing.

So do you think there's just some sort of randomizer machine that decides which of you got this email sent to your identical addresses? As described by svandamme, you certainly do NOT have the same address.

well like i said , epic retard levels then.

All I know is what happened. When you look at the addresses they look the same. This one time he got an email meant for me. I’ve never gotten one meant for him. I have no idea what goes on behind the computer screen. Maybe one of the squirrels (or is it monkeys?) flipped the wrong switch that time.

Is he your unknown doppleganger, long lost unmentioned, twin brother, brother from another mother ?

Leave me out of this.SmileWavy

So it was you!

My gmail address has been firstname.lastname@gmail for a long time.
I just tried signing in without the period, and it brought me to my account, so I doubt there's a second account, all my info is there.

I have a fairly unique name, from what I can find there's only 3 of us in the US with the same first and last name. That being said, the wife of another one of "me" frequently signs up for stuff with my name @ gmail.com, and I get weird newsletters from time to time. I used to get offers to test drive a truck and get $50, but I haven't got one of those in a long time.

what format is your email adres, so we get an idea here.

lastname.firstname@gmail.com

Oh man this is weird, really weird.

I also have a Gmail account that is in firstname.lastname format and my name is also Patrick.

I also get other peoples emails all the time. Some of them to a professional photographer that shares my full name. Hell I got one this morning from some event manager in Arizona wanting to forward my contact info to someone about an event I'm supposedly working.

wdfifteen, PM your email address if you don't mind. I wonder how similar ours are.

Can you send me the STMP header of an email you sent to him ? in PM

How to read email full headers
Open the email you want to check the headers for.
Next to Reply Reply, click the Down arrow Down Arrow.
Click Show original.
Copy the text on the page.

paste it in pm, you can strip the message you sent him, i just need the SMTP header

Just tested this. From my O365 account, I sent an email to my Gmail account adding a random "period" inserted.

Makes no sense.

I’ll have to do it when I can get to my computer. This iPad is a pain to do anything on but type and read.

My gmail address is of the format <first initial>.<last name>; I regularly get emails that are meant for my cousin, who shares my email address but for his middle initial inserted. Initially I was mystified but it didn't take long to figure out via context and content that they're for him, so I either forward them or write them back and give them the correct address. But what does mystify me more is that I regularly get a monthly bank statement for a man in Panama who shares my first initial and paternal family name. And occasional emails with things like quotes for road construction projects in Venezuela (?) Trying to correct them seems to have no effect.

Advantage of having a unique name I suppose...

Did it come through?

Yes, it came through. To be a bit more clear, my gmail address is first and middle initial plus last name, all one word. I added a dot (.) between the initials and last name. It came right through and a quick look at the the header appeared completely normal.

Gmail must be stripping special characters including "." from all email addresses.

In case anyone is still working on this, I have a Hotmail/Outlook account that is first-dot-last@ address. I just tried to log in as FirstLast@ and it would not recognize the account.

Makes me think this is a Gmail thing.

no doubt about that

I have had a gmail account since gmail was new. It’s firstlast@gmail.com. A few years after I had it I started getting emails that were legit, but weren’t for me. Apparently there is someone with my same name in England that is using first.last@gmail.com. I randomly get bills, business info, and other things. I contacted gmail years ago and they told me that he can’t have the same address with a “.” but that sure seems like what’s happened.

Happened to me on the Comcast email system. No dots in the address either, had to send multiple screenshots to Comcast security support and it still took them over a month to fix it. Same support excuse, "it can't happen", well look at the f'n screenshots I'm sending you.

I’m telling you guys. This was a thing at one time.

Willing to bet the original dev team was split, front end UX/UI team, back end team who handled the DB, and the guys working on the actual functionality.

Either the UI/UX guys did not think to prevent the use of periods and the DB guys were focused on using user names as the check for duplicate accounts.

It’s not a difficult thing to screw up in a large multi team deployment.