[richardw]

If they forgot a dot and received a "no such mailbox", they'd check and fix it.

Some data, sans opinion: I checked my trash this morning after clearing it out. Total messages in trash: 47. Trashed messages linked to the "fredflintstone" variant: 40, all of them spam. The other 7 are all real messages I've just deleted after reading, none of them are spam.

[InsomniacL]

> If they forgot a dot and received a "no such mailbox", they'd check and fix it.

why would they? do you think another person would not register fredflintstone@gmail and another user could register fred.flint.stone and another user fred.flints.tone

then you have lots of people using email addresses that are the same if the end user excludes the easily forgettable punctuation marks.

Your anecdote about one person who keeps giving your email address out does not mean that Googles dot policy is bad.

I can't expand any further on what I've already said so I'm going to leave the discussion

[richardw]

Two things can be true at the same time:

1 only one person can own all variations

2 that person can choose to have all other variations except the selected one, blocked. Make it a checkbox. Done.