GMail contact - misroute / security issue

Tue Sep 30 16:29:45 UTC 2014

Related oddness: if you're British and a GMail user, you either got a
gmail.com username before the lawsuit, or you got a googlemail.com
between the lawsuit and the point when Google and the owner of the
"gmail" trademark settled, or then you got a gmail.com again.

Google chose to alias googlemail.com and gmail.com addresses so as to
minimise the mess, but this doesn't stop people who have
googlemail.com entering gmail.com (or vice versa) when they set up an
account on www.somewebsi.te, because they are conditioned to use
gmail.com/googlemail.com interchangeably, and then being baffled as to
why firstname.lastname at googlemail.com (or vice versa)/password1234
doesn't work, because googlemail==gmail and anyway my address is
really firstname.lastname at gmail.com (or googlemail) - look, I get
email on it, it must be the right one :-)

On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 12:17 AM, Jeff Woolsey <jlw at jlw.com> wrote:
> On 09/29/14 10:06, Nicolai wrote:
>>
>> Most likely reason: gmail is so common that someone mistypes
>> johnsmith at example.com as johnsmith at gmail.com, not paying attention to what
>> they're doing. It happens.
>
>
> More likely, I think, is that newbies think that email addresses already
> exist for everyone on the planet at firstlast at gmail.com, and they just give
> that when asked (maybe they think it's throwaway and never actually expect
> to get any email there).  I'm in the same boat.   It doesn't bother me all
> that much because gmail is not my primary mail service.  I use it to store
> big stuff that's clogging the mail service I do pay for.  In fact, it can be
> entertaining, as I get usernames and passwords for sites that this guy
> signed up for.  He's also a poker player and has recently tried to enroll at
> an art college.  The latter I could reply to and explain that their
> prospective student is an idiot and should not be accepted, but that's what
> will happen anyway if I don't say anything.
>
> --
> Jeff Woolsey {woolsey,jlw}@{jlw,jxh}.com first.last@{gmail,jlw}.com
> Spum bad keming.
> Nature abhors a straight antenna, a clean lens, and unused storage capacity.
> "Delete! Delete! OK!" -Dr. Bronner on disk space management
> "Card sorting, Joel." -me, re Solitaire
>