Are you among those who have dots in your email address? You know, mark.wilson@whateverserviceyouareusing.com or the.engineer@wonderfulengineering.com? If yes, then you know how important it is to make sure that people write your email address correctly. However, Google doesn’t care if you have a dot in your email address. Yes, that is right. theengineer@gmail.com and the.engineer@gmail.com are not different at all!
Google took this decision when it was launched and has ignored periods in the users’ email addresses since then. According to a post on Google’s help forums;
- homerjsimpson@gmail.com = hom.er.j.sim.ps.on@gmail.com
- homerjsimpson@gmail.com = HOMERJSIMPSON@gmail.com
- homerjsimpson@gmail.com = Homer.J.Simpson@gmail.com
No matter where the period (dot) is placed, the message will make its way to the same dude every time. It has been like this for years, and still, not many people are aware of it. That is why you can see people stressing on the dot in their email address.
However, different companies tackle this situation differently. Some don’t allow periods at all, while others are sensitive to them, whereas companies such as Google don’t really care if you are using dots in your email address. Check out the following list that will help you understand where the dots matter and where they don’t matter.
- DOTS MATTER: Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo Mail, Apple iCloud
- DOTS DON’T MATTER: Gmail, Facebook
- DOTS STRICTLY PROHIBITED: Twitter
However, it should be noted that services generally do provide the users with the option of using other special characters for their handles. For instance, Gmail ignores the plus sign and anything that follows the ‘+’ sign. This means that I can use theengineer+spam@gmail.com for filtering out any unwanted senders from my email.
There is no consensus on why companies have a different take on this. The best guess is that some companies simply cannot switch to the dot-less email addresses because it would mean that they have to delete thousands of accounts.