Couldn't this just be a person who doesn't know how email works? Maybe they use joenone@aol.com and just assume that gmail.com works the same?
The reason I suggest it is that the "dots don't matter" behavior has been in Gmail for a while. I'd be surprised to find that they assigned two people the "same" username. Anecdotally, I've actually had people sign up to websites using one of my email addresses (ie: a random person used one of my Gmail accounts as the backup email address on his Gmail account).
I signed up for gmail and have a simple account name in the form of {common firstname}{first letter of last name}@gmail.com. The amount of crap that has started to show up in my inbox over the last year is completely ludicrous--and I believe it's all from people who, like you say, just don't know how email works.
As of today, my account is associated with seven addresses--that is, seven people said my email address was their alternative email address. 2,000 messages in the spam folder over ~1 month. Sometimes a dozen can hit my inbox per day; But, I'm guessing these are legit newsletters that people use my address for. And someone in South America used it to sign up for a facebook account. I was getting slammed with his friend requests and lost password requests until I just filtered them out.
Comments
Couldn't this just be a person who doesn't know how email works? Maybe they use joenone@aol.com and just assume that gmail.com works the same?
The reason I suggest it is that the "dots don't matter" behavior has been in Gmail for a while. I'd be surprised to find that they assigned two people the "same" username. Anecdotally, I've actually had people sign up to websites using one of my email addresses (ie: a random person used one of my Gmail accounts as the backup email address on his Gmail account).
I signed up for gmail and have a simple account name in the form of {common firstname}{first letter of last name}@gmail.com. The amount of crap that has started to show up in my inbox over the last year is completely ludicrous--and I believe it's all from people who, like you say, just don't know how email works.
As of today, my account is associated with seven addresses--that is, seven people said my email address was their alternative email address. 2,000 messages in the spam folder over ~1 month. Sometimes a dozen can hit my inbox per day; But, I'm guessing these are legit newsletters that people use my address for. And someone in South America used it to sign up for a facebook account. I was getting slammed with his friend requests and lost password requests until I just filtered them out.
sigh ... Rant over, and I feel better.