I am sorry, I don‘t understand it, could you dumb it down?

Emails to [email protected] are sent to [email protected]? The other way round?

If [email protected] exists, a new account for [email protected] can‘t be made?

I'm not sure how that could even be an issue. You need access to the gmail account to confirm the email either way. The only possible issue I can imagine is a poorly built site assuming that all email servers do this and ignoring dots in emails.

You are assuming that the said site has an email confirmation workflow as part of the registration process (Granted most do these days, but it wasn't the case many years earlier). Even so, you are also assuming that the said site would block your usage unless you confirm your email.

Assuming one John Smith creates an account as [email protected] ; and then another John Smith happens to create an account as [email protected] - and doesn't confirm the email right away (either the site doesn't ask for it; or doesn't really block any functionality - just keeps showing an annoying warning message). First John Smith can now easily take over the second account by triggering a change password flow - for shit and giggles.

One of these users doesn't own the email address they have input. If it's the first one, I'm not sure how they could trigger a password reset without access, if its the second one, then I'm not sure why it's surprising you can have your account reset when you signup with someone elses email.

Gmail ignores dots, the actual account is [email protected] and everything else is just aliases.

bizarre

[email protected] can be any combination of [email protected]

https://lifehacker.com/your-gmail-account-has-unlimited-addr...

For the sake of clarity: any combination of j.o.h.n.[email protected].

I agree! I have seen this happen to me years ago when Gmail debuted. But, this used to work - at least for Facebook. So, someone changed something at Facebook I guess - and decided to canonicalize the email. The other mystery of course is how the email set on my OG a/c just disappeared. It does not show up. Anyway, I will see what I can get done through official channels

P.S. I did start off with [Help HN] in the subject; but for some reason that was auto removed by HN. So `[Help HN] text` became just `text`. I eventually edited the subject to at least put in `Help` there.