Weird e-mail thing

[Seb1780]

We have a weird thing happening with the e-mail of one of our parents. The mother of a couple of our students has her e-mail listed as [email protected] but any mails sent to this address are being sent to [email protected] which belongs to a completely different person!

 

I’m aware of at least two messages that have done this. I checked one of the original messages and it was definitely sent it to [email protected] but it went to [email protected] who replied within minutes.

 

Has anyone any idea what might be causing this? I’ve never come across anything like it.

[Michael]

Two things come to mind -

 

- What mail setup do you have?

- It could be a forwarder or rule that's forwarding the email on, but of course is out of your control

[Seb1780]

We're on O365

[Michael]

I'd say most likely it's an issue out of your control, but the school should notify the parent by other means (such as phone), as I agree, it's a little odd.

[Seb1780]

Yep, we've disabled the e-mail address and contacted our parent by other means.

 

We've checked routing out of our domain and it is leaving with the correct address.

 

It's as if the unintended recipient has an alias set up on their account that matches our parent's address.

[HC_Netman]

I was under the impression that Gmail doesn't recognise '.' and therefore both emails should be the same person. I take advantage of this myself to sign up to sites i think may send junk mail.

 

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150?hl=en-GB

[elsiegee40]

I was under the impression that Gmail doesn't recognise '.' and therefore both emails should be the same person. I take advantage of this myself to sign up to sites i think may send junk mail.

 

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150?hl=en-GB

 

It doesn’t. You can put the fullstop anywhere in the email address and emails will go to the correct person.

 

You can also use [email protected] and [email protected] interchangeably.

 

I use both these to my advantage when needing multiple email accounts [emoji4]

Edited April 29, 2020 by elsiegee40

[Chaniel]

I was under the impression that Gmail doesn't recognise '.' and therefore both emails should be the same person. I take advantage of this myself to sign up to sites i think may send junk mail.

 

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150?hl=en-GB

 

This is the correct answer, it will also not care about putting anything like "+word" after an email address, very useful for signing up to websites (e.g. sign up to EduGeek with [email protected]) and if you start getting random emails to that address from other websites, you know edugeek has shared your data.

[Seb1780]

So, if I understand this correctly, the dot doesn't matter. But we are sending to the undotted address and receiving replies from the dotted address.

 

Could this be right?

[HC_Netman]

Yes - the chances are the email address they use as their default is the one with the dot in and therefore the replies come from that.

[elsiegee40]

So, if I understand this correctly, the dot doesn't matter. But we are sending to the undotted address and receiving replies from the dotted address.

 

Could this be right?

 

Yes. They have created it with the dot. I login with the dot and I suspect they do too

[Seb1780]

Thank you all - it's helped a humble Data Manager out no end :-)

[elsiegee40]

@Seb1780

 

With gmail it all comes down to how you registered the original account.

 

My gmail account is a very old one and, due to another person at the time owning the rights to gmail.com and flatly refusing to give it up to google, is [email protected]

 

When giving it to others, I quite regularly just say [email protected] and what they send me reaches me. If I reply to the email, it always sends from [email protected]

 

It’s another variation for your Data Manager to be aware of for the future!

[andy_b]

@Seb1780

 

When giving it to others, I quite regularly just say [email protected] and what they send me reaches me. If I reply to the email, it always sends from [email protected]

 

 

 

You can change this behaviour in Settings, Accounts and Import, Send mail as, switch to gmail.com.

[elsiegee40]

You can, but few are going to change it dependent on which email address variation it was sent to.