I have a first.last email, but it's created quite the interesting situation. Turns out some dude in Australia has the same first+last name as me, and he's been using firstlast@gmail.com. As far as I can find from Google's documentation, the email with no dots should be the primary and the one with dots an alias, but I'm guessing because I registered mine ages ago (back in 2006) it takes precedence. I have no idea how he hasn't noticed that his gmail emails are going to another inbox - maybe Google delivers them to us both or something? Regardless, I've gotten very personal emails (like from his therapist) and tried to reach out explaining the situation and asked these parties to let him know he needs to stop using that email, but to no avail.

Honestly the one who is at fault here is Google. If first.last and firstlast are treated as aliases, they straight up should not allow people to create them once the first exists, rather than just send emails to someone else. I've tried to respect my Australian brother's privacy (like not reading his therapist's emails and such), but not everyone is gonna do that.

I have exactly the same issue (I get an insane amount of email for other Firstname Surname people that isn't me from various other places in the world), but I'm 100% sure at this point that it's people using the wrong email address, as occasionally when I contact the people to let them know they've emailed the wrong address, they have actually told me the real email address they should have used, and they were missing a number, or in one case it should have been an initial instead of the full first name.

I used to also think that Google were screwing up by allowing a 'clash' of firstname.surname and firstnamesurname, and maybe they did a bit in the 2004-2009 period, but with lots of testing over the years (sending test emails to both), I'm confident now it's 'just' other people's emails getting 'simplified' too much when being told, and it ends up being sent to me.

I do however think Google shouldn't have allowed that alias situation to arise.

I also think (based on the fact that my 'un-dotted' email alias has been successfully used to sign up for various services for the other people) that many online services just have very poor sign-up validations of emails.

When I was a kid, I used to get a ton of emails for a guy who put the wrong email address on a dating site. It was always interesting at 13 to have to tell women that I wasn't the man they were interested in.

Are you sure he actually has that address? I get lots of emails mistakenly sent to me, some via a dotted version of my address, but I'm pretty sure those people (or the ones trying to contact them) have just misremembered or typoed their actual address. I'd be very surprised if Google did allow firstlast and first.last to exist as distinct addresses tied to separate acccounts.

He has a different address than yours and has given out an incorrect version to some people (perhaps a misspelling of his name).

The dots are ignored.

I have this same issue! But I can log in with or without dots… but it’s like someone else thinks their email is my email without the dots. I can’t really figure out what is happening. The volume is way too high for it to be spam though.

It would be just he uses a similar email, say last+first@gmail and gives it out incorrectly at times. Or people assume it is his. My friend has a first+last@gmail and I constantly confuse the order (or was it last+first? idk), a decade later. So you two are just seeing a subset of incorrectly addressed email, imo.

I remember a decade+ ago when this was discovered as some issue and caused a bunch of drama in the blogosphere.

I get emails to name@gmail for someone who has @name on Twitter - they seem unable to understand these are different things.

Same here, I have first.last since 2005: every combination of dots or not are aliases to my first.last and cannot be registered. There a thousands of first last in the world, and apparently, all of those that have a gmail account are also quite bad at giving their email address... ^^ They probably have firstlast123 and the numbers evade! I receive things daily, from simple accounts miscreated (thanks for the one month Netflix account 6 years ago) to plane tickets, notarized acts for land sell, medical things etc. I tried to respond etc. but no one understands that I'm not their recipient. Crazy.

As a matter of fact, I just wrongly received a confirmation email for the order of an engagement ring!

If Im not mistaken, periods are ignored entirely. I regularly sign up for free trials with variations on first.last@gmail.com, firstlast@gmail.com, f.i.r.s.t.last, etc and they all come to my inbox.

Oh god I have this problem with my firstlast@outlook.com address. I have a common english name so get the emails of other people from all over the world. The worst are subscriptions and regular invoices.

I had to give up using the address.

I have firstinitiallastname and I get A LOT of emails sent to firstinitial.lastname. Someone even used it for their bank account.

A bit off topic, but changing your name when getting married is so strange to me. It is not at all common where I live (Belgium), in fact I don't think I personally know a single person who did.

Different cultures, different traditions. Personally I think it's a beautiful symbol of unity for one person to take the other's name (though I'm neutral as to which party should change their name, and I was perfectly willing to take my wife's name if she had wanted that), but of course that's the culture I was born into so it seems normal to me.

Not only is it strange, it’s obviously very sexist in practice. In majority of the cases, it’s always the woman who changes her last name. The husband gets to keep his. I still find it very strange and shocking that powerful women with successful careers in modern society still keep changing their names after getting married.

By such a definition any tradition related to gender would be sexist. The tradition is that the wife will change her name. This tradition is why it makes up the majority of cases.

No, any tradition that favors one gender over the other is sexist. Which is absolutely the case with the tradition of women taking their husband's family name when they get married.

Any tradition had to be introduced as new at some point. Matriarchies were a thing. And still are in some regions of the world.

Not really - this “tradition” as you call it obviously started back in the day when women did not have equal rights in society and only the husband’s lineage mattered.

How do you propose fixing that? Let the kids take both parents last names? In few generations you end with kids having their entire family tree as their last name! It might even make marrying within the tribe attractive again to keep last name single word!

Portmanteaus

It is not sexist at all, let alone "obviously very sexist". Don't impute malicious motives to people like that, it's extremely rude.

Come on man, I think it's safe to say a tradition that favor's men over women is reasonably sexist, especially given the time the tradition established women were property.

I don't think Belgium's feelings will get hurt, besides wait until you learn about all the other things that Leopold II did.

I changed my name to my wife's name when we got married. Where I live, everyone can choose if they want to keep their name or change it to either ones. So its a free choice.

AND: Hope gmail will rollout this feature asap, so I can FINALLY adjust my email address too.

These traditions stem from pre-contemporary patriarchal societies, where the man leads the household and thus his name is retained.

There have been matriarchal societies in history, but they all ceased to exist. Make of that what you will.

Actually it's strange to learn that outside Spain and Portugal there are other countries in EU where you do not change your name when married!

I was very happy to take my wife's name when we got married. A free choice I made. And I think there is nothing weird about it.

While optional, it's very common in France.

What last name do your kids use?

Last name of father and mother, respectively.

  let motherLastName = "Carter Hughes"
  let fatherLastName = "Miller Thompson"
  let childLastName  = "Miller Carter"
  let childFullName  = "Jean Paul Miller Carter"

Or so that is how it works in many countries around the world.

You might ask, —“Why does the father’s last name go first and the mother’s second?”— That’s an old tradition, and it can change whenever enough people in our society agree. As it stands, the father’s family name tends to persist down the family tree, while the mother’s family name often disappears in each generation.

Or so that is how it works in many countries around the world.

Ok. So your children get their grandfather's names.

The names of their grandmothers get dropped.

Only a partial improvement over just dropping the mother's name.

You should have given a more complete example, where the parents themselves have long names to demonstrate that something does have to get dropped when you have children.

Hughes and Thompson were both dropped in their example.

My bad, I misread the parents' names as their full names.

> What last name do your kids use?

In the country where he lives (Belgium), the parents get to decide which family name the kids get.

But I think you only get to decide for the first kid? All following kids will have the same family name. At least that's the rule in the Netherlands.

It hails from when family lines were important, and you can practically only have one line reflected in a name. Unsurprisingly, most societies considered the male's name to be the dominate lineage of interest, although that doesn't hold true 100% of the time.

> you can practically only have one line reflected in a name

Not true at all. You can trivially have two family names in a full legal name. In fact many cultures do exactly that to this day.

Also worth noting that the male's name being preferentially propagated makes a lot of sense in a society where the best off frequently inherited their vocation from their fathers.

What societies?

Keyword being "practically". Just because there is an alternative doesn't mean society will adjust.

And hyphenation isn't a solution, it only works for one generation.

> Just because there is an alternative doesn't mean society will adjust.

"It isn't practical to do" and "society at large didn't go this direction" are very different statements.

Hyphenation is two names in a trench coat. Maintaining two names indefinitely works just fine as long as you discard rather than endlessly compound. Presumably the only requirement is that it be straightforward to trace any given lineage.

The traditional approach is for women to keep their maternal name and discard their paternal name on marriage while men do the opposite. But of course any scheme could work, up to and including each person arbitrarily choosing which name to discard (not sure how they decide on ordering in that case).

Another historical approach is the Foo Barson, Baz Fooson (Barson) approach. That scheme treats the male and female lines as being entirely separate so it doesn't quite match what you're after but it was quite practical.

Preserving more than one lineage and providing a cohesive family name isn't practically easy, and society did not go that direction, and that likely isn't a coincidence.

Discarding names doesn't preserve lineage. If you need a book to trace the names, then the point of using a name for lineage has failed.

> The traditional approach is for women to keep their maternal name and discard their paternal name on marriage while men do the opposite

It sounds like this scheme is "men keep one name lineage, women keep another".

Which, IMO, has the practical drawback of not identifying the current family unit. Lineage was important, but so was gathering all folks together into a household. When taxes, religious ceremony, etc. occurred, there was one household name on the roster responsible. This was particularly important in societies where men held certain rights for the household.