New York - If you were to e-mail someone and leave out the dot in their e-mail address, it’s a good bet the message would bounce.
But Google decided to do things differently from other e-mail providers when it launched Gmail. Namely, it decided to ignore periods in its users’ e-mail addresses altogether. That’s right – they make no difference.Your e-mail would get through if it was addressed to: [email protected]; [email protected]; or [email protected].
You could even e-mail [email protected], and your message would still make its way to the very same doughnut-loving dude.
This is not new – it’s been this way for years, and I’m sure a lot of people reading this realised it long ago.
But the funny thing is how many people haven’t – and I’m embarrassed to admit that I was among them until recently.
All these years I’ve been making a point of pronouncing the “dot” whenever I tell people my gmail address, when I could have just as easily remained dotless.
That got me wondering: in which other domains are the dots superfluous, and in which do they make a crucial difference? And how do different companies decide which standard to observe?
For some reason, none of the companies I contacted was eager to discuss their policies or rationale with regard to dots in user names, either because they considered my query unworthy of a response, or because they’ve never really given it a lot of thought. Left to my own devices, I experimented a bit and arrived at the following tentative taxonomy:
DOTS MATTER: Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo Mail, Apple iCloud
DOTS DON’T MATTER: Gmail, Facebook
DOTS STRICTLY PROHIBITED: Twitter
Did I miss any important ones in the list above? Anyone have a theory as to why some companies persist in differentiating based on dots while others dropped them long ago? It seems to me that Google and Facebook have the right idea, although of course it would be impossible for older services to follow suit at this point without deleting a lot of users’ accounts in the process.
Perhaps this is simply one of those standards that will never really be standardised across services. – Slate/The Washington Post News Service