[schwinn140]

PREACH. This is hands-down the single largest reason why I abandoned my Gmail. I receive countless people's credit applications, loan details, new credit card details, bills, etc, credit collections, etc.

All because they have the same last name as me and opted to use a period in their email address.

This is happening across multiple countries as well. Sadly, none of these people ever receive their important messages because I gave up trying ages ago.

How they continue to explain this away as a feature is beyond me. Google is constantly pushing forward with various, and perhaps superficial, security/privacy oriented initiatives yet here's one of their core products offering up the most private details of others without zero care to fix it. SMH

[stingraycharles]

This type of stuff happens all the time. I’m actually receiving all kinds of internal information from a large insurance company from India, supposedly because one of their employees is registered with a typo in the domain name, which is my domain.

I can’t for the love of god make clear to these people that there must be a dozen laws this violates. I see insurance application, invoices, disputes, everything on at least a weekly basis.

I have no idea what my legal position in this is. I tried reaching out to the senders, but I am afraid of reaching out to the C-levels directly because who knows how they respond.

Bottom line, people make typos all the time, and it’s not just dots that cause this. People are just terrible at email and email is terrible for sensitive documents.

[compscistd]

I don't know how this would happen under their policy.

> Adding dots doesn't change your address, so dots aren't why you got someone else's mail. Instead, the sender probably mistyped or forgot the correct address.

> For example, if someone meant to email [e-mail] but typed [e-mail], the message went to you because you own [e-mail].