I have a user id to gmail that is joe.none@gmail.com. Gmail has assigned joenone@gmail.com to someone else. All his personal (including his banking details) emails are showing up in my inbox and also, he tries to reset the password every other day and that also shows up, in all the emails that is associated with my gmail account. Gmail says joe.none & joenone are the same email addresses, but I can guarantee you this is not the case. Has anyone run into this issue? If yes, please direct me in the right direction to solve it. Thank you.
Couldn't this just be a person who doesn't know how email works? Maybe they use joenone@aol.com and just assume that gmail.com works the same?<p>The reason I suggest it is that the "dots don't matter" behavior has been in Gmail for a while. I'd be surprised to find that they assigned two people the "same" username. Anecdotally, I've actually had people sign up to websites using one of my email addresses (ie: a random person used one of my Gmail accounts as the backup email address on his Gmail account).
Probably the guy thought he had the gmail address and filled it in forms when actually he didn't.<p>If one of these emails has his phone number, call him. If not, contact e.g. a bank that sends email to him, tell them "you've got the email wrong. Please notify your client because I have no way of reaching him, and you probably do". The fraud department of the bank will be able to take care of that quickly - you can start with "either this is a fraud, or a mistake, but here's the story ..." when you talk to them.<p>It might be helpful to tell them (and hopefully relay to him) that this is YOUR email address, you've had it for a while.<p>Expect the guy to ask you to sign over your email address to him, because his name is "Joe None" and your violating his property, or something crazy like that. Don't get angry, and definitely don't do anything stupid like impersonating him, logging in to his bank account or anything like that.<p>This is not legal advice, and I hope you won't need any after you do the right thing and try to resolve this....
"Gmail doesn't recognize dots as characters within usernames, you can add or remove the dots from a Gmail address without changing the actual destination address; they'll all go to your inbox, and only yours."<p><a href="http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=10313#" rel="nofollow">http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=10313#</a>
Long thread on the issue:
<a href="http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=2d9f38bf10a53893&hl=en" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=2d9f3...</a><p>Short Story:
There's been an 'urban legend' that people from the early gmail invite days could register the same email, the only difference being dots. The more likely scenario is that he's filling in the wrong email on web forms, it's emailing you, and it's not emailing him at all. He doesn't have access to the email.<p>Is there anything that proves he also has access to a dot-version of the email account? You being sent emails from banks only proves that he's filling that email into a form, not that he has access to the account.
joe.none@gmail.com, j.oenone@gmail.com, joenone@gmail.com, joenon.e@gmail.com is the same email/account as far as google is concerned. You should be able to login into your gmail/google account with either of these and your existing password simply because google doesnt care about that dot in the username.
So your problem is not with gmail, but with whoever is using your email account to register for things.
I have this exact same issue. My nickname "nat" can be short for both Nathaniel and Natelie. And apparently there is a Natelie with the same last name as me, and she seems to use my email address with a dot in it. I've been getting frequent flier emails, school emails, and more. Whenever it is an automated email, I contact their customer service and explain the situation, then unsubscribe.<p>If the email seems to be personal, I respond and ask them to have "Natelie" contact me, but she never has.<p>I agree with you, it's very frustrating. I don't have any solution, but I'll be following this thread closely.
I have the same issue. I had collected a number of signup emails for sites/services and finally when I received an email from a real person they were able to communicate with the person who's non-dotted address my dotted address had seemed to have taken over.<p>My gmail account has been around since invite beta.<p>I figure that somewhere along the lines google changed their system from dotted and non-dotted addresses being unique and accounts made before this have been affected.
I have the exact same issue with noah.clark@gmail.com and noahclark@gmail.com<p>I've probably gotten HUNDREDS of e-mails for noahclark@gmail.com (I can tell by checking the to field) in my noah.clark@gmail.com. I know where he lives, what type of art he collects, major purchases, and some pretty significant family issues as well as the homework he has been assigned.<p>I just do my best to notify who ever sent the e-mail that they have the wrong address.