When I started my Information Technology career as a software programmer in IBM I was taught that if the software that you created or is selling is behaving in a manner that is not as expected you always and immediately declare that “it is a feature, not a bug.” That programmer’s mantra has served me well even long after I left IBM and ventured into other areas of interests.
And so when I recently discovered a peculiarity in my e-mail address in Gmail I immediately recognized it as a bug. But the programmer in me instinctively went to work to find possible practical uses — and therefore value — from this Gmail bug. And of course I found what I was looking for (It is never a bug, remember?). So now I am declaring it a feature.
I discovered that Gmail treats a dot (.) before the @ sign in a very peculiar way — it IGNORES it!
Now what’s so special about that? Consider my gmail account: bong.saculles@gmail.com. As far as Gmail is concerned it is identical to any of the ff:
- bongsaculles@gmail.com,
- b.ongsaculles@gmail.com,
- bo.ngsaculles@gmail.com, etc.
I’m sure you got the drift.
Since Google allows 2 dots before the @ sign, my email address is also identical with the following:
- b.o.ngsaculles@gmail.com,
- bong.sac.ulles@gmail.com, etc.
The potential practical applications derive from the fact that although Gmail ignores the dots before the @ sign, most other systems do not. In other words, the above addresses which are considered identical by Gmail are unique addresses to other systems.
An example of a potential practical application is in managing multiple Twitter or Plurk accounts, or other similar systems. Let’s take Twitter as an example. Since Twitter requires a unique email address associated with each account, it is quite cumbersome to manage several accounts because it means having to maintain multiple email accounts and having to regularly check each of them. By using a Gmail account and making it appear like multiple different addresses as I’ve illustrated above, you can “cheat” your way around this Twitter restriction.
There are a couple of caveats, however:
- This only works with the dots. Doesn’t work with dashes and other characters or symbols.
- This only works with the @gmail.com email domain name. I tried with our company’s domain name (e.g. @companyname.com) and it didn’t work.
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