This is not Gmail's designed or advertised behavior.

http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

Either you or your friend is misspelling their address (more common than you might think, I get opt-in mailing-list mail for [email protected], intended for [email protected]), or you've encountered a bug.

You can put periods inside the username part of a gmail address and it still gets through. I'm not sure how what you're saying could be true? Maybe it wasn't always this way.

funny. Because if you own the address [email protected], I thought you also own [email protected].

The dots are for you to play around with, but the mail all goes to one account. Or, at least, that's how it works with my account.

Early first.last@gmail accounts had firstlast@gmail reserved for them. Google stopped doing that a few years after launch.

Are you certain? Im under the impression periods in email addresses, anywhere, do not affect delivery

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/1-awesome-gmail-tip-you-dont-kn...

Periods in gmail addresses to not affect delivery. other mail servers may behave differently.

I had no idea they stopped doing that! That seems a pretty serious change of model, I'm glad I know it now.

They didn't stop.

I thought it was the other way around: mail to [email protected] will be delivered to [email protected] unless [email protected] was registered early on.

Not always.

Google's own [email protected] mailing list has this as the "To:" field:

[email protected]

And at the bottom of the message:

To unsubscribe from this group, send an empty message.

I had to ctrl-u and check the "Delivered-To:" and "X-Forwarded-For:" headers before I could unsubscribe.

(I'd tried to unsubscribe previously but the subscribed email account forwards to my main account so replying with an empty message didn't work. This thread prompted me to dig a little deeper and finally get one less piece of email per day - thanks HN!)