Dots and Gmail
We guys were having a discussion on “Why doesn’t Gmail allow underscores in email addresses”!
I believe many of you would have given a thought about it, so we came up with the following ideas of our own:
- Dots are better and underscores are ugly
- When email addresses are underlined underscore “_” is often treated as space “ ” and for a layman email address can have space
- a combination of dots and underscores might have made emails more uglier.
There were more suggestions put in when i asked the question here on superuser.com.
Interestingly a point was pointed there on the way Gmail Handles dots in your email.
Let’s say we have two email addresses
Now actually an email address a.n.i.r.u.d.h.g.o.e.l@gmail.com is also my email address, so is ani.rudh.goel or anirudhgo.el.
Also you can create aliases for your emails using + sub addressing, i.e. you add some character which tells the gmail server that the mail is intented to you, but for the outside world it looks completely different, thus i can have anirudhgoel+workemail@gmail.com.
An interesting use can be to track spam messages, where upon registering on a particular site i can register as anirudhgoel+sitenameisabc@gmail.com
So all messages sent by them will be delivered to me and i can see if there were any spam messages.
Enough of introduction, being a Computer Scientist, i was thinking of the way it would have been implemented and my answers were answered here.
So what gmail does is, it removes all dots from the email address and truncates all text after “+”" till “@”. This way following email addresses are all same
anirudhgoel, anirudh.goel, a.n.i.r.u.d.h.g.o.e.l!!
Interesting right? Comments welcome
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