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Interesting.

So, my gmail is fname.i.lname@gmail.com. I see SOMEONE else's purchase in my history. That persons name is shown as fname lname@gmail.com. Same as mine except .i. is three spaces.

WTF? Does Google have a bug here? Is there an actual real life human I could send this to?

Edit: the only purchase I see of mine are for Apps I bought from the play store. These don't show up in the link that the Googler posted above.



Isn't it sad that a company that totally dominates modern email, plays so fast and loose with email standards?

And not just obscure standards; email addresses are very much public-facing elements of email. The expectation when you register an email address is that that address is now uniquely associated with you. The public does not expect that an email might be delivered to other inboxes than their own.

Why does gmail elide dots again? There must be some reason why a big email provider would deviate so egregiously from the conventions all other email services comply with.

/me not a gmail user, except for certain account recovery purposes.


Sounds like a security flaw. I’d submit it to a big bounty program.


The other person probably just entered OP's email address. I don't really get what OP is saying but make sure to note that periods are normalized out.


they are saying us.middlename.mannk@gmail is seeing receipts for us.mannk@gmail.com

The dots don't matter.


Exactly this.


I see, but these "receipts" are just emails. I would be extremely surprised if someone else's emails are getting routed to your gmail inbox. Seems very unlikely...


haha you should see the folks who are like:

jennifer@gmail.com marksmith@gmail.com neilpatel@gmail.com

etc. etc. etc.


Yeah, user error is more likely here, knowing the security in place at Google. That said, I suggested submitting it since the exercise of creating a repo will make it clear one way or another.

Win / win either way for OP. Learning opportunity or a bit of cash in hand for relatively little investment.


The link above, https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/category%3Apurchase... is just a search of your Gmail inbox for "category:purchases". You get exactly the same results by opening Gmail and entering "category:purchases" in the search box. Each of the results is an email that was delivered to your Gmail address, i.e. an email actually in your Gmail inbox or archive. So if you're saying you're seeing someone else's purchases, it means email meant for them was delivered to you (and you didn't notice it at the time for some reason). You can click through to each individual email to see when it was sent and by whom etc. So if it's a bug, it's a bug with Gmail delivery itself; it's not a bug with the purchase categorization specifically.


It’s not a security issue. It’s a user confusion and poor validation issue.

I was an early GMail user and have a common-ish name. I probably get 30-50 emails a month from confused people ranging from contracts to receipts to racy photos.


I used to get alert emails, from google, for what appeared to be someone with my email address in another tld. I probably could have reset their password and accessed everything. Maybe they can access my email.

I sought support but never got anything official and commenters brushed it off. But I'm pretty sure it was similar to your issue.


i think this is a case of gmail ignoring periods in your email address and applying the same rule elsewhere.

As an example name.lastname, na.melastname and namelast.name are all the same email address.


Would fname.i.lname be the same as fnamelname?


fname.i.lname@ == fnameilname@


The "i" only exists in one of the addresses.


Exactly. "Would fname.i.lname be the same as fnamelname?" -> No.

"fname.i.lname@gmail.com" is the same address as "fnameilname@gmail.com"




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