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Gmail might partially be to blame for me receiving emails from other Sean
Conners
I was reading the Lobsters thread [1] about the article “A researcher bought
noreply.net. Companies started sending him secrets [2]” when I left a comment
[3] about my own struggles with receiving emails for other Sean Conners [4].
That started a thread that swamped the comment section about other people who
had similar stories, so it's nice to know that I'm not alone. Also, here's
one of my favorite comments in that thread (for reasons that should be
apparent):
> I was about to say, "I know a guy with a whole blog series about that." But
> then I looked, and you were him.
>
“Lobsters comment from Jason McBrayer [5]”
Heh.
But the thread as a whole left me with the idea that there's still a lot of
people out there that barely understand email and aren't even sure what their
own email even is. Sad.
I did get an email about my comment from Keong Lim, claiming it was mostly
Google's fault for the confusion and linked to this fairly damning answer at
Stack Exchange:
> It is a lesson in human nature that so many experts simply recite Google's
> pat answer on this as if an assertion were identical to empirical reality.
> I am one of the early account holders with the firstname.lastname@gmail.com
> accounts. About three years ago, I began receiving email directed to
> firstnamelastname@gmail.com. By triangulating the information I was able to
> glean from their dry cleaners, car dealer, etc. I was finally able to
> contact these people (about 3,000 miles from me, BTW). The DO have the same
> account as me, minus the period. We were able to determine that only a
> portion of email "leaks" across accounts. Unfortunately, the fact that I
> had my account 10 years before they had theirs did not convince them to
> leave the account to me. Thus, I live with the occasional notice from the
> bank, school, etc. Because of this, I no longer use Gmail for anything
> important or confidential.
>
> The most disturbing thing to me is Google's insistence that they could not
> have made a programming mistake when they clearly did. These folks are
> arrogant in their faux humility.
>
“Why does Google not consider dot in usernames of Gmail addresses? [6]”
The “pat answer” is that Google is that it's cutting down on possible
confusion over who receives firstname.lastname@gmail.com and
firstnamelastname@gmail.com, but it seems that the “pat answer” is a somewhat
later change to Gmail to ignore periods in the local part (the part before
the “@”) of the email address. I think Gmail is leaning heavily upon this
portion of “RFC-5321: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol [7]” to justify this:
> 2.3.11. Mailbox and Address
>
> As used in this specification, an "address" is a character string that
> identifies a user to whom mail will be sent or a location into which mail
> will be deposited. … Consequently, and due to a long history of problems
> when intermediate hosts have attempted to optimize transport by modifying
> them, the local-part **MUST** be interpreted and assigned semantics only by
> the host specified in the domain part of the address.
>
(emphasis added)
I know I signed up early enough to Gmail to get sean.conner@gmail.com and at
that time, seanconner@gmail.com might have been considered a different email
address. After the change, it appears that Gmail might get confused sometimes
and mess up some legacy addresses at times.
While reading all that, I did go down a small rabbit hole with what
characters are actually allowed in an email address. It's unclear if anything
but ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is allowed,
but there are surprisingly little in ASCII that isn't allowed. Out of the 95
defined graphic characacters (which I'm including the space character), the
following are not allowed:
Table: ASCII characters not allowed in an email address
character name
------------------------------
Space
" Quotation Mark
( Left Parenthesis
) Right Parenthesis
, Comma
: Colon
; Semicolon
< Less-than Sign
> Greater-than sign
@ Commercial At
[ Left Square Bracket
\ Reversed Solidus
] Right Square Bracket
Technically, they could be used in an email address if they're escaped, but
it's discouraged heavily.
[1] https://lobste.rs/s/exgfc0/researcher_bought_noreply_net_companies
[2] https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/a-researcher-bought-noreply-net-companies-started-sending-him-secrets/
[3] https://lobste.rs/s/exgfc0/researcher_bought_noreply_net_companies#c_uv25wk
[4] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2024/12/17.2
[5] https://lobste.rs/s/exgfc0/researcher_bought_noreply_net_companies#c_oj1jy0
[6] https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/14668/why-does-google-not-consider-dot-in-usernames-of-gmail-addresses/90466#90466
[7] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2026/08/11/rfc5321
Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org
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