What's Wrong with Gmail?

It started ever so slowly a number of years ago, an occasional email obviously meant for someone else landing in my Gmail account. I wrote if off to a misspelling or someone entering their email address incorrectly while signing up for a service. Slowly the number of these emails increased, rapidly approaching an epidemic level. I dutifully unsubscribed from newsletters. I sent nice emails to folks I didn't know who had unknowingly sent to me pictures of their children, reunions, and vacations shots that they had a wrong email address and to please check with the intended for the correct address. What happened? Even more unsolicited email poured in to my inbox to include bank communications, employment verifications, emails lamenting breakups, and messages of an even more personal nature. It became obvious that a number of Gmail users thought they indeed had "my" Gmail address.

My next move was to begin building the fortress. One by one, I created a new filter for each unwanted email.  After creating over sixty filters nothing changed. Still new emails not caught by my filters not intended to me plagued my inbox.

I searched for help on the Gmail support section and then discovered I was not alone in my situation. I scoured for support contacts and sent info regarding my predicament. No response. I opened bug reports. No response. I searched for Gmail product managers online and sent them information regarding what was happening. No response. Surely, Google would be interested in the fact that I was receiving other Gmail users' sensitive emails. Apparently not.

You see, Google sees this as a feature. That's right, an added benefit of using Gmail. One of the capabilities of Gmail is that you can place a "period" anywhere in your Gmail address and their servers will ignore it. For instance, if your email address is somename@gmail.com, you can also use some.name@gmail.com, or s.o.m.e.n.a.m.e.@gmail.com. All incarnations of this email address will go to somename@gmail.com. Additionally you can attach a plus sign to your Gmail address, such as somename+anythingcangohere@gmail.com. The plus sign and everything else up to the ampersand is ignored.

Google sees this functionality as a way to assist us in managing our email. You can use different versions of your address for different purposes and create filters based on them. This explanation seems reasonable but here's the deal. Google also reports that no one can sign up for a period version of your address. If you have somename@gmail.com, no one is supposed to be able to sign-up with some.name@gmail.com. The problem, as I see it, is that at some point and time people have been able to get period versions of other Gmail user’s addresses. The company denies this but some people swear that they have been able to do it. Also, the difference between some.name@gmail.com and some.Name@gmail.com is so subtle that inevitably these two accounts at some point will get each other's messages.

Here’s a thread where users are pulling their hair out over this headache and begging for Google to remove this so called feature.

The company maintains these reasons as to why it “appears” you are receiving someone else’s email:

• Your address is similar but has more or fewer dots or different capitalization.
• Another possibility is that someone else has accidentally configured their account to automatically forward mail to you.
• The message you received was probably the result of a common practice among spammers called 'dictionary spamming.' Dictionary spammers often use a software application to randomly guess email addresses based on words in the dictionary.

It’s apparent that Google doesn’t consider this an issue for its users and has no plans to remedy what many of us see as a gaping hole in their email system. I have to say that as a result of this I’ve really lost my confidence in Gmail. Whenever I click the send button I wonder who else other than the intended might receive the message. I never use my Gmail account for anything too personal and never use it for any serious or sensitive business transactions. Until Google changes their position regarding doing away with this unwanted feature, I’ll just look at my Gmail account for exactly what it is, a free, loosely supported email service, where any if not all of my messages can easily become publicly consumable.