Email address decoding

Matthew

Matthew

Touchdown! Greaser!
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Apr 18, 2005
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Display name:
Matthew
I’ve been running into some interesting email issues: I get someone else’s, so I’m wondering if he gets mine.

We both use the same email provider, so the “@service.com” is the same. The catch is that we both use the same name, with one difference.

I’m, for example, “MatthewPilotsOfAmerica” and he’s “Matthew.PilotsOfAmerica”.

I’ve gotten 2-3 of his personal emails, but I typically get hit several time a day by mailing list type emails from places where he’s subscribed.

Does that “.” not really make a difference? I haven’t had any complaints that I’m not getting emails sent to me, but is there the potential he’s been getting mine?

He’s actually a real person, at least his lawn service company and his daughter’s math teacher think so, so I don’t think this is anything malicious.
 
You can look at the emails you receive and verify that whoever sent it typed your email address, not the other guy’s. And yes, that period does matter.
 
I'm going to dig a little deeper. I had to fire up the laptop, my phone doesn't easily (at least I haven't figured it out) show email header info.

It's possible that someone, somewhere, is just not entering the ".".
 
I've dug through one of the emails from his daughter. I actually did respond back to her to let her know.

I also dug through a few others.

I saw two different email addresses that went to me:

1) MatthewPOA (that's mine)
2) Matthew.POA

And there was a 3rd:

3) Matthew<single letter initial>POA. I don't THINK that one came to me, but it's hard to tell since it also had one of the above addresses also attached.

As far as #2 above, I'll have to dig some more, I delete them, and I don't have a clean copy to view that I can easily find.

I'm starting to wonder if that <single letter initial> sometimes gets left out when someone sends or responds to his email. But I'm not so sure that "." is getting used.
 
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ArrowFlyer86 said:
I think Gmail is different?
View attachment 124414
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That’s correct; it’s also why you can’t create a account that will conflict with an existing one. In other words there cannot be a matthewPOA and a matthew.POA account. Any provider that would deliver both to the same mailbox would also prevent the two being separate accounts.

So if he’s matthewPOA the provider would not also allow a separate matthew.POA account, if they would deliver both to the same mailbox.

People mistype email addresses ALL the time. Email providers very rarely screw things up to that degree. Not that I’ve been running private, commercial, and corporate email systems since 1994 or anything… :)
 
DaleB said:
That’s correct; it’s also why you can’t create a account that will conflict with an existing one. In other words there cannot be a matthewPOA and a matthew.POA account. Any provider that would deliver both to the same mailbox would also prevent the two being separate accounts.

So if he’s matthewPOA the provider would not also allow a separate matthew.POA account, if they would deliver both to the same mailbox.

People mistype email addresses ALL the time. Email providers very rarely screw things up to that degree. Not that I’ve been running private, commercial, and corporate email systems since 1994 or anything… :)
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I probably didn't even know what email was in 1994 :).
Pretty much my whole life has been on GMAIL, I can see why I thought that was a feature common across all systems! My bad.
 
Possibly ... Some senders think that the gmail method (register x.y@gmail.com and you automatically also get xy@gmail.com. Sending to either works) is universal and they have decided to only keep one of the versions in their database.

So they have decided to transform "Matthew.PilotsOfAmerica" to "MatthewPilotsOfAmerica" and as a consequence you are getting the messages.
 
It always annoyed me that gmail doesn't quite comply with rfc822, but they are not close to being the most egregious offender. At least plus signs are not rejected by shoddy sanitization code.

This is probably a case of 1) typos and/or 2) google tail wagging the internet dog and people expecting everything to work like gmail.

Also, I thought the point of having a throwaway account like myname.sketchyservice@provider.com was to use that account ONLY at sketchyservice, so you could see who they sold your address to / damage control if they get compromised...
 
GeorgeC said:
It always annoyed me that gmail doesn't quite comply with rfc822, but they are not close to being the most egregious offender. At least plus signs are not rejected by shoddy sanitization code.

This is probably a case of 1) typos and/or 2) google tail wagging the internet dog and people expecting everything to work like gmail.

Also, I thought the point of having a throwaway account like myname.sketchyservice@provider.com was to use that account ONLY at sketchyservice, so you could see who they sold your address to / damage control if they get compromised...
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I have a few of those myname.sketchyservice addresses. But I use an underline “_” instead of dot “.”. I’ve run into at least one case where a site wouldn’t accept that “_” as a valid character.
 
It depends on the service. GMAIL ignores the dots in the addresses. You can insert them or not.
This is not part of the mail standards. As far as RFC822 goes, the dot is a significant part of the address. Most providers treat them just like any other character (for sure outlook/hotmail does).
 
Yeah, your problem is how the '.' is being handled in the email address.
 
dots and dashes can really throw off spam email systems. that's why my email address is . -- .- -. .---- ..--- ----- ----- .--.-. .-.. .. -.- . .- -. -.. ... ..- -... ... -.-. .-. .. -... . .-.-.- -.-. --- --
 
flyingron said:
It depends on the service. GMAIL ignores the dots in the addresses. You can insert them or not.
This is not part of the mail standards. As far as RFC822 goes, the dot is a significant part of the address. Most providers treat them just like any other character (for sure outlook/hotmail does).
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So, max address length of 30 in gmail = 31 out-of-band bits per message... 2 billion identifiers ought to be enough for anyone.
 
eman1200 said:
dots and dashes can really throw off spam email systems. that's why my email address is . -- .- -. .---- ..--- ----- ----- .--.-. .-.. .. -.- . .- -. -.. ... ..- -... ... -.-. .-. .. -... . .-.-.- -.-. --- --
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.-- . .-.. .-.. / .. ... -. .----. - / - .... .- - / ... .--. . -.-. .. .- .-..
 
tlglenn said:
Sometimes senders mix me up with someone named Teresa who apparently wears lingerie and receives Florida emergency disaster alerts.
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That makes perfect sense to me. If you're going to walk around like that, you need some advance notice to get dressed if there's a hurricane or other natural disaster.
 
This happens to me at work. Not much you can do other than make a digital friend (to send mistyped emails) and make sure folks type your address correctly
 
GeorgeC said:
It always annoyed me that gmail doesn't quite comply with rfc822,
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Fun trivia fact. RFC823, which defines the standard for delivering email, was written by Mr. Postel.
 
bflynn said:
Fun trivia fact. RFC823, which defines the standard for delivering email, was written by Mr. Postel.
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Yep, he had heard that comment a gazillion times before he died. I knew Jon. He passed in 1998 and hence was one of the first of the internet age guys to pass.
 
eman1200 said:
that's why my email address is . -- .- -. .---- ..--- ----- ----- .--.-. .-.. .. -.- . .- -. -.. ... ..- -... ... -.-. .-. .. -... . .-.-.- -.-. --- --
Click to expand...
Earlier this week I sent an email to the above line of dots and dashes.

I got a return email showing plans on how to cheat the election in November.

And now there are several black Suburbans circling my house.

Should I be worried.??
 
Zeldman said:
Earlier this week I sent an email to the above line of dots and dashes.

I got a return email showing plans on how to cheat the election in November.

And now there are several black Suburbans circling my house.

Should I be worried.??
Click to expand...

Could you please share the plans?
 
Zeldman said:
Earlier this week I sent an email to the above line of dots and dashes.

I got a return email showing plans on how to cheat the election in November.

And now there are several black Suburbans circling my house.

Should I be worried.??
Click to expand...

nah, u good. the suburbans are just a distraction from what's really comin' your way.......well, either that or you-know-who trying to find the interstate.
 
flyingron said:
Yep, he had heard that comment a gazillion times before he died. I knew Jon. He passed in 1998 and hence was one of the first of the internet age guys to pass.
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So many people don’t know what the RFCs did for (and to?) us, I know he wrote a lot of them.

One of my undergrad projects was to write a windows mail client implementing 822 and 823. I got an A because I met the standard to be able to send and receive mail with attachments, read and reply. The first email I sent on it that worked went to a friend and was from God@heaven.edu sending the 10 commandments with a request to forward them to Moses. Looking back it was a great way to learn about how this network stuff worked.

I think the next year I was working support and were playing around with this Mosaic thing that some guy in Switzerland had invented to share research. All that foundation has been a huge part of knowing the solid core of IT networks.

They were great days.
 
bflynn said:
I think the next year I was working support and were playing around with this Mosaic thing that some guy in Switzerland had invented to share research. All that foundation has been a huge part of knowing the solid core of IT networks.

They were great days.
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Mosaic was developed primarily by Marc Andreessen at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications at the University of Illinois. I know this bit of trivia I because somehow I got picked to demo this first-ever web browser on CNN. That still amuses me because I had nothing whatsoever to do with developing Mosaic. I was an early user, doing molecular modeling for a company that had partnered with NCSA

Marc went on to develop and commercialize Netscape.

The Swiss guy you reference was probably Sir Tim Berners-Lee, English, but while working at CERN in Switzerland was credited with inventing the WWW, HTML, and HTTP.
 
I wrote a parser for RFC822 date formats early on and found that one major implementation was inserting non-compliant dates. Of course back then I knew who wrote the code and asked him when he was going to fix it. It took him a while complaining about something else and I told him that I'd fix that problem as soon as he fixed his mailer dates. (Mark Crispin and the TOPS-20 mailer for any old guys who were curious).
 
GaryM said:
Mosaic was developed primarily by Marc Andreessen at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications at the University of Illinois. I know this bit of trivia I because somehow I got picked to demo this first-ever web browser on CNN. That still amuses me because I had nothing whatsoever to do with developing Mosaic. I was an early user, doing molecular modeling for a company that had partnered with NCSA

Marc went on to develop and commercialize Netscape.

The Swiss guy you reference was probably Sir Tim Berners-Lee, English, but while working at CERN in Switzerland was credited with inventing the WWW, HTML, and HTTP.
Click to expand...

Yes, Berners-Lee didn't invent Mosaic, he invented HTML and what we call web servers now. Pre-search engine days, there used to be a listserv that announced the new servers that were added and after a few months they had to shut it down because it was overwhelmed.

I was working in education at the time and we couldn't get the professors to understand the value in publishing their papers online to be shared. One of the first online stores was Godiva, so when I showed them that, they got it.

You can publish your papers online and share them with colleagues all over the world - blank stare.

You can go to www.godiva.com and order chocolate - OHHHHHH....
 
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