Today I received an email on my non-gmail account (the alternative email set in my gmail) with the link to reset the password of my gmail account. I never requested for the password reset, and I was amazed about that. The interesting thing was the email mentioned the gmail id in it for which the password reset request was made but it was not my ID. My gmail id is talalmasood but the password reset request which was made was for talal.masood. (CORRECTION TO MY THIS ARTICLE IS “GOOGLE USERNAME WITH UNIQUE FEATURE)
[ad#ad-taalz-inpost-left]I thought I might have registered talal.masood too with gmail some time back and I have forgotten about it, so I thought to proceed and reset the account password and check it. I clicked the link and changed the password. After that I was amazed to see that there was no talal.masood account rather gmail logged me in to my talalmasood id. Then I tried one more thing, I signed out and then logged in again. Instead of using my real id (talalmasood), I used the talal.masood and it logged in and again it showed me the inbox of my talalmasood.
Conclusion
[ad#ad-taalz-inpost-right]something.something and somethingsomething are identified as similar IDs by Gmail. If someone has already registered somethingsomething then you cannot register something.something anymore.
I have not tried the vise-versa thing that if someone has something.something account then does gmail allow you to register somethingsomething? I am leaving this part to you readers to check.
As far as I know, it’s not a bug, and this apparently undocumented ‘feature’ is present for as long as I remember. You can add . anywhere in your gmail id and it will still work, so if you have anything@gmail.com, you also have a.nything@gmail, an.ything@gmail any.thing@gmail etc. and vise versa.
I am not sure what happens if you add multiple .s though, never bothered to check all the possibilities. 🙂
Oh and the reason I think it is a feature and not a bug, is because .s usually only confuse people and many people forget to write those or add them when they don’t exist, with gmail you don’t have to remember it, it will always be delivered to right person 🙂
I agree with you Aqeeliz. I was mistaken about this feature and I have written a new article related to it. Would love to have your comments on it. 🙂
Good Job, this so great from you.