GMail contact - misroute / security issue

Tue Sep 30 17:20:56 UTC 2014

This probably also effected German users.
On Sep 30, 2014 6:32 PM, "Alexander Harrowell" <a.harrowell at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
> >
>