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Getting someone elses gmail

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Old 9th Feb 2011, 19:08
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Getting someone elses gmail

Imagine my email address is [email protected].

I'm getting emails for a guy whose account is [email protected].

Last one had personal details, which is rather worrying.

Anyone else experience this?
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Old 9th Feb 2011, 20:17
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Is it spam or genuine email ?

Your address is probably in the BCC field.

See also ...

Contacting Support - Gmail Help
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Old 9th Feb 2011, 20:40
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Gmail ignores punctuation in its email address. So mail to aero-belly@gmail arrives in the same inbox as aero.belly, aero=belly and so on. It does allow the same name with no punctuation at all, eg aerobelly@gmail in this case (tested this evening). If there is duplication it may well have come from their recent merge of googlemail (UK only AFAIK) and the main gmail system. Contact support is my advice too.
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Old 9th Feb 2011, 21:01
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Thanks for the link - this is the resolution:

Sometimes you may receive a message sent to an address that looks like yours but has a different number or arrangement of periods. While we know it might be unnerving if you think someone else's mail is being routed to your account, don't worry: both of these addresses are yours.

Gmail doesn't recognize dots as characters within usernames, you can add or remove the dots from a Gmail address without changing the actual destination address; they'll all go to your inbox, and only yours. In short:

* [email protected] = [email protected]
* [email protected] = [email protected]
* [email protected] = [email protected]

All these addresses belong to the same person. You can see this if you try to sign in with your username, but adding or removing a dot from it. You'll still go to your account.

If you get mail that seems to be intended for someone else, it's likely that the sender entered the wrong address, just like if you've ever dialed a wrong phone number for someone. In these cases, we suggest contacting the original sender or website when possible to alert them to the mistake.
I tried to send an email to the guy, but it delivered to my inbox, so I guess he has given out the wrong email address.
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Old 10th Feb 2011, 03:08
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Something similar happened to me at the rather large company I used to work for. Some lass half a world away had given my email address by mistake and I was getting all her work, and some personal email (in French, which I happen to speak). At first I would forward the email and kept telling her to give out the correct address, but the bitch never replied so I stopped re-sending the emails, and started reading them instead

She even gave out the wrong email, four years latter, on her job application with a competitor--only once I decided I wasn't interested in the offer myself, I passed it on to her. She did reply to that one; that was the first, and last time I heard from her after reading her emails for years.
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