Cautionary tale about proofreading e-mail addresses in Gmail

So in my professional life I have an e-mail address that is, analogically, glomarmailbox at gmail.com (which is an e-mail address that I'm making up for the purposes of this post and which, as far as I know, doesn't exist). I went with this scheme for a few reasons: my first name is not unusual, but it's often misspelled; my last name, standing alone, was already taken; and any combination of firstname, lastname, and middle initial would include potentially confusingly placed letter l's, which look like numeral 1's in too many fonts. But my reasons for choosing that scheme are completely irrelevant to the anecdote here.

If you try to send e-mail to me at that address and put a dot between glomar and mailbox -- that is, glomar.mailbox -- then Gmail, in its infinite (and increasingly creepy) wisdom, will helpfully send the e-mail right to glomarmailbox. I say "increasingly creepy" because I didn't actually ever sign up for that username with the dot in it. Gmail just figured it out.

Now, in another country on another continent, there's an individual who uses the e-mail address glomars.mailbox at gmail.com, as in, "possessive Glomar without the apostrophe, dot, mailbox." This is not very surprising, because remember that "Glomar" here, my last name, is not a terribly unusual name, and in fact it's a relatively ordinary first name, too, in English-speaking countries. So what happens when a sender misspells my Gmail username?

Here's what Gmail does. It doesn't magically figure out that the username with the dot and without the dot are eerily similar, and it doesn't apply some freakish AI to see the syllable breaks. And in fact, it's not "creepy" at all, but rather it's that they've hit upon a good way to avoid disputes, typos, and a lot of administrative grief. What happens is that, when you choose some username, Gmail both (1) ignores any dots you put into it when you select it, and then (2) ignores any dots the e-mail sender puts into it when they're addressing e-mail to you. That is, you could put a dot anywhere in glomarmailbox and it would get to me. You could even send mail to g.l...o.m.a.r..m.a.i.l.b.o.x and it would get to me.

But you can't send it to glomarsmailbox, with that s in there, or to any dot-containing variation thereof. If you do, it'll go to this other person in another country on another continent.

And when one half of a married couple that glomarsmailbox was arranging a three-way with sent e-mail to glomar.mailbox instead of to glomars.mailbox, I was hit with a complete series of ten or twelve days' worth of e-mail outlining exactly what each party was into, how much E they like to use, and where and when they figured they could next get together.

There are two lessons here. First, just hit the "reply" button and don't type in e-mail addresses if you don't have to. And second, clean up your e-mail replies after every few back-and-forth exchanges! Select all those pages and pages of text at the bottom and delete them. If the sender here had done so, I would only have seen what looked like a "coffee was nice, let's see a movie on Friday, xoxo" message.