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I'm not really sure how email routing works, but someone ordered something on Amazon and I received the email instead of them. Or maybe we both got it, I don't know. The order doesn't show up in my account, so I'm certain I wasn't charged for it, but I shouldn't be getting other peoples' emails.

We'll say that my email is [email protected], and somebody who's email is [email protected] places an order on Amazon. The confirmation email is sent to me at [email protected]. I checked the email header, and it did say To: [email protected] which is not my email address.

At first I thought that Google ignores periods in email addresses, but I tested the account setup and it doesn't give any error when you put a period in the address. I didn't create the account; I just used the "check availability" function and the address I chose with a period was fine.

Maybe someone with knowledge about how Email works could tell me why this happened. Is this a bug in the way Amazon sends emails? Or is it a bug in how Google receives them? Who should I report this issue to?

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  • It must be a spam. Just ignore it or mark it as spam.
    – balki
    Jan 15, 2011 at 18:09
  • I am having the same problem. My email is firstname.lastname@gmail and the other person's is firstnamelastname@gmail. I know this is an active person - I've received personal emails and login info to reputable sites. It's not constant, I don't know how to fix it.
    – user56942
    Jan 13, 2014 at 23:45

3 Answers 3

11

Gmail does indeed ignore dots in addresses. Go to Gmail's help page about Receiving someone else's mail and read the section titled "Your address is similar but has more or fewer dots (.) or different capitalization."

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  • Thanks. I can't accept your answer since the question was migrated and it's not recognizing me as the asker for some reason.
    – jonescb
    Jan 4, 2011 at 20:15
  • 4
    @jonescb You'll need to go to your control panel and link your account.
    – AndrejaKo
    Jan 4, 2011 at 20:29
5

The from and to fields of an email are not validated and easily forged. Consider this a phishing scam. Did you get to amazon's site to log in using any links in the email you received? If yes, you might have been set up for some sort of man-in-the-middle attack to harvest your account credentials.

1

Google has this feature that it "routes" mail to you. Actually all of the accounts are yours [email protected] even with more dots.

More in Gmail help

The answer before is also true.

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