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Yet more noise on emails from other Sean Conners on the Intarwebs
It appears that someone is wrong on the Internet [1], and if Hacker News is
anything to go by [2], that person is me! [3] Or rather, it might Justin
Prime who wrote that Stack Exchange post [4] about Gmail's possibly buggy
support for periods in the local part of an email address.
But one thing not brought up in the Hacker News thread is that Gmail supports
custom domains. So if some other Sean Conner were to have Gmail support email
for example.org, then I would expect seanconner@example.org (our hypothetical
Sean Conner who is not me) to be distinct from seanconner@gmail.com (which is
me). And now I have to wonder if this might be a cause for some of the issues
being reported? Google is a Leviathan system with millions of moving parts
where a slight mishap (like a timeout or some lost packets on a database
lookup or even a bug on a system not yet updated) causes email being
delivered to seanconner@example.org to end up being delivered to
seanconner@gmail.com.
I'm just trying to figure out what is more likely via Occam's razor [5], that
a large, distributed system like Google has the occational hiccup, or a
surprisingly large number of people forget their email addresses, especially
given how important email addresses are for account recovery, password
resets, and the like? I mean, it could be both. I'm just wondering what
causes the larger number of incidents now that I'm seeing I not alone in all
this.
[1] https://xkcd.com/386/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49326229
[3] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2026/08/11.1
[4] https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/14668/why-does-google-not-consider-dot-in-usernames-of-gmail-addresses/90466#90466
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor
Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org
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