I usually take over & lock / delete the account or alert their fraud department, along with the Google Answers link about how the dots work.
LinkedIn scraper spam without the dot? "Hi thanks for wanting to hire me, I don't reward scrapers"
Ironically enough I didn't put in this dot-removal logic in the app I maintain at work. For one, it makes creating test accounts really easy - the second is that most of our customers have their own domain, so @gmail is very rare.
anecdote:
I got an email one day to me (first and last name) for the receipt of a small medical purchase that definitely wasn't mine. At first I thought was getting scammed.
Then I realized, the only thing that was correct was my first and last name. Address, last 4 of PAN, state, everything was incorrect.
Upon opening the eml directly I realized it was actually sent to [email protected], whereas my email address is [email protected] (note the period).
Did some googling, there was in fact someone with my first and last name in the area of the address.
I called the phone number given, it was indeed a man with the same first and last name. Explained what happened and forwarded the email.
So while, yes, Uber absolutely should be doing better, so should google.
I'm guessing someone is going to tell me that's correct behavior according to the spec, and if so, the spec is wrong, full stop. Those are not the same email addresses.
Are you saying that there is someone registered with exactly the same account name on gmail, except with an added period?
[email protected] and [email protected] and [email protected] all canonicalize to the same account.
So, it seems likely the other person still wrote their email address down wrong - but it wasn’t the periods that they got wrong. If this is the case, then I can’t see how there is anything google could do to fix this situation.
FWIW I have <first initial><surname>@gmail.com and get loads of email intended for <first initial><their middle initial><surname>@gmail.com, apparently they just keep writing it wrong.
So I very much doubt the person put their email in incorrectly, but I understand your point.
The exact mechanics of how it happened I don't know, but I very much disagree with [email protected] and [email protected] resolving to the same address.