The most humerus conversation I got added to involved a local residential community dispute where everyone assumed my insistence of being removed from the thread was actually my namesake trying to avoid the conversation.
His wife finally stepped in to resolve the situation.
I have the same problem but multiplied by 25x due to having a <first initial><last name> gmail address from 2004 when it was still invite only. It’s really annoying that there’s so many services that don’t verify email addresses…
It is quite the odd situation. I reply to their friends saying they have the wrong email, but they don’t seem to believe me. And they keep signing up for things despite presumably never being able to actually access many of these services that require email verification.
My guess is it is someone not very computer literate. But it is always amusing.
Given how reliably this happens, I guess the answer is "no". It's also probably a very small number of people, just 1 or 2 with each commonly used name. But still every common name has those 1 or 2.
Genuinely confused - which other people? There are no other people with your Gmail address but added/removed '.' characters. What you're seeing is people sending emails to the wrong email address - nothing to do with presence or absence of '.' characters.
Allowing addresses to subtly differ based on '.' presence/absence would result in more wrongly addressed emails, hence the aliasing.
I've been getting wrong Gmail emails all the time for years because a woman in Saskatchewan keeps getting her email wrong when signing up to stuff online. Quite funny really but nothing to do with .'s