When A Stranger Emails, Part II: Dots Don’t Care About Your Feelings

Since my last post on the subject, people have continued to use my email address to register for various services.

Yesterday, I received a notice from Snapchat that an account had been created successfully…using (you guessed it) my email address!

“Great!” I thought, “I always wanted to be a snappy chatter.”

So, I used the link to access my new account. At that point, I noticed that the email address slightly differed from mine because it had a dot (period) between my first and last name.

Most email providers will treat this as two separate addresses (e.g., something@nowhere.com is a different address than some.thing@nowhere.com), but not Gmail!

Instead, it ignores any and all dots in the prefix (i.e., something@nowhere.com = somet.hing@nowhere.com = s.o.m.e.t.h.i.n.g@nowhere.com, etc.)…

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At that point, I decided that I’d gotten this far in life without being able to chat snappily and that perhaps I didn’t need (nor want) this account, so I deleted it.

But the Snappiest of Chatting Services was not done with me yet, for it wanted to wait 30 days just to be sure I knew what I was doing. Within a few minutes, the serial email borrower decided to reactivate the account, so I went ahead and deleted it again.

We went back and forth like this about a half dozen times until finally, about 25 days later, I got a message letting me know the account was finally being deleted. Thank fuck, and let that be a lesson to them. Except we both know it won’t…