address syntax

Here’s what is sure to be your favorite fun factoid forever from today: At Gmail — for the domains gmail.com and googlemail.com — whether or not the username portion has dots in it is irrelevant. If you send mail to al.iverson.mailbox@gmail.com and aliversonmailbox@gmail.com, you’re sending mail to the same person, the same account, twice. Don’t take my word for it — here’s the Google help page with details.As Google indicates, this does not apply to Google for Business, aka G-Suite addresses. So if you send mail to al.iverson.mailbox@wombatmail.com and aliversonmailbox@wombatmail.com, those are indeed two separate addresses.The Gmail “dot thing” is sometimes a huge pain in the rear for senders. If you can work it into your registration forms, you could try normalizing Gmail addresses by removing the dots, to prevent duplicate submissions. Or disallowing dots in the username, if the domain is gmail.com or googlemail.com. However, even this is a bit…