*@gmail.com

[mabbo]

"If everyone would just stop replying, this would end! Why are you all still hitting reply all?!"

-latest reply all on every reply-all storm.

In my early days at Amazon, around 2012-2015, this would happen frequently enough [0]. I pretty quickly learned the best thing to do was to ignore the conversation and never think about it again rather than try to 'help'.

[0] - too many new products and orgs set up new mailing lists with 5000+ people on it, most of whom had no idea what it was. Growing pains.

[_notreallyme_]

At amazon in 2010, someone sent an email to everyone on the "all" mailing list to ask if anyone had seen it. A reply-all storm ensued, and despite several people asking to stop hitting the reply-all button, it continued for several days.

The management had to chime in and sometimes threatened people with punishment if they continued participating to the reply-all storm.

If you ignored the conversation you may not have seen it, but most reply-all storm ended up with someone saying something the line of "we don't care about your wallet".

Anyway, asking people to stop hitting the reply-all button is far from being the latest reply-all on these kind of things...

[jraph]

Never really happened to me, but Thunderbird has a pretty good feature for this case: "Ignore message thread". I'm sure other mail clients have this feature as well.

If someone is bothered by such a thread, it's really easy to avoid.

[teddyh]

• The story of Bedlam3: <https://rodneymbliss.com/2013/10/17/i-survived-bedlam3/>

• Ornk! <https://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/on-sea-lions>

[karlkatzke]

I’m apparently still known for my snark during a reply-all storm at TAMU on an internal mailing list, 15 years ago.

[neongodzilla]

This shit still happens with regularity.

[franze]

    Address not found
    Your message wasn't delivered to \*@gmail.com because the address couldn't be found, or is unable to receive mail.
    LEARN MORE
    The response was:
    550 5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist. Please try double-checking the recipient's email address for typos or unnecessary spaces.   
     Learn more at https://support.google.com/mail/?p=NoSuchUser f15-20020a05651201cf00b00500994b137asor390839lfp.19 - gsmtp

[rcarmo]

This is a great reminder that Gmail ignores dots on the left side of the @ symbol, which means I am constantly getting e-mail for other people.

The “+” tagging was a great idea, but the fact that incorrect address matching has become a “feature” (and not fixed over decades) plus constant spates of spam has made me believe there’s nobody left at the helm who actually understands e-mail.

I’ve kept my Gmail addresses for some mailing-lists, but moved everything of consequence to better providers.

[nmeofthestate]

> This is a great reminder that Gmail ignores dots on the left side of the @ symbol, which means I am constantly getting e-mail for other people.

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

[TonyTrapp]

Just one anecdata, but in my case, all of the unwanted signups I get on my gmail address are not due to dots - they are flat out because people input my email address exactly the same way as I would - without dots. I think it's more a side-effect of gmail being "the" global email namespace for millions of people, not because of anything their service itself is doing.

[InsomniacL]

> This is a great reminder that Gmail ignores dots on the left side of the @ symbol, which means I am constantly getting e-mail for other people.

That is not how it works, you own every combination of your email address with dots left of @ automatically.

if you own [email protected], then nobody else can own [email protected] because you own it, it's an alias of your email address esentially.

[yreg]

What do you mean 'not fixed'?

"Fixing" that would break a documented feature millions of people depend on.

[johnwalkr]

The “+” aspect mostly works great but has some weird edge cases when other companies don’t accept them. For example, I have a few apple ids using this feature, from moving to different countries. Apple no longer allows new accounts using “+”. My existing accounts work for iCloud, app, store etc but they do not work for logging into Apple support.

[laurentlb]

Can you clarify how ignoring the dots is a problem?

[richardw]

Drives me insane. And so many people and systems auto adjust addresses, produce almost mine, and then gmail delivers the random output. I once set up a google group to forward mail to.

I’d pay to block the “full stop ignore” feature.

[nytesky]

The “+” alias feature rarely works for me when registering for sights. They say invalid.

I have used “.” Variations to create multiple accounts on a service.

I wonder what the limit is?

Can I do …first.name@ and first……name@ and so on for infinite names!

iCloud has auto anonymous emailing with plus, Firefox does to, but tying my services to such a feature rather than even just an email seems fragile.

[beardyw]

> This is a great reminder that Gmail ignores dots on the left side of the @ symbol

But sometimes handy to fool sign ups and use it twice (or more depending on length). I wonder if you can use multiple dots?

[causi]

This is a great reminder that Gmail ignores dots on the left side of the @ symbol, which means I am constantly getting e-mail for other people.

Which can create problems with services who don't consider them the same. A decade or so ago I had an awful time trying to sort out two of my Xbox Live accounts that only varied by the dot, and couldn't figure out why I was still being charged when my account page said it was canceled.

[myko]

That's a feature, it is by design and some folks like it. I do. Surprising to hear people are hitting your inbox with the oddball period.

[jnrk]

> but moved everything of consequence to better providers.

What other providers do you recommend?

[InsomniacL]

I've realized a lot of people don't understand how the gmail dot feature works and blame it for all their problems.

If you own [email protected], you also own every combination of it using dots left of the @. for example:

[email protected]

[email protected]

Nobody else can register these addresses because they're all owned by [email protected] automatically.

[dismalpedigree]

I don’t think this was always the case. I had two separate accounts around 2007ish. Separate passwords for each. <first>.<last>@gmail.com and <first><last>@gmail.com.

[gadders]

I love a good reply-all email storm.

I remember a Lotus Notes-based on in a bank I worked at the early 90's. I think it only stopped when the Chief of Staff did a reply-all with "The next person to reply-all to these emails is sacked."

[aczerepinski]

I’ll never forget the day that there was pizza available on the 10th floor of corporate headquarters and an email sent to thousands of employees who do not work at headquarters.

[eru]

Sounds like an invitation to find a PC accidentally left unlocked and sending a joke reply.

(Don't do this in real life, please.)

[Tobu]

https://xkcd.com/2822/ -> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2822

Any other fun easter eggs in the XKCD counter?

  - https://xkcd.com/404/ 404s (obviously)
  - https://xkcd.com/1337/ is about hacking

[jraph]

I can only imagine the code that handles the previous and next buttons and the counter, with all the exceptions there probably are. the next of 403 is correctly 405, which correctly has 403 as its previous.

[thomasfromcdnjs]

Auto replies would kill it pretty quick.

"I am currently on leave" could be the Wikipedia page.

[ChrisArchitect]

Reminded of the NHS "Reply-All hell" from 2016 that crippled a huge chunk of their systems

The NHS's 1.2M employees are trapped in a 'reply-all' email hell

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12950830

[randomcarbloke]

This happened internally at Reuters, it was hilarious.

[aequitas]

There was this nice talk recently about the history of email and the fun you can have with email addresses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrGfahzt-4Q

[mcdonje]

Filter: Subject contains "new friends"

Action: Play sound [if working in office], Forward to "[initial sender]", Mark as read, Move to trash

[benrapscallion]

Emails can only be forwarded to verified accounts (i.e, owned by the person setting up the forwarding rule)

[NautilusWave]

Always use BCC when sending an email to a large mailing list!

[vidanay]

I'm just dying to click that +Expand button.

[pmayrgundter]

That's just Wall ;)

[naillo]

xkcd on the HN front page, tech is healing

[drcongo]

Is this funny?

[Dudester230602]

Well, they don't shut down things where the user is the product.