A Spooky (but fun) incident with GMail

I recently filled my Gmail id in an application form (on paper) that asked for my email address. The period in my email address probably got overlooked by the guy at the other end who punched in the details manually and as a result although I received a mail that I had successfully registered, they would not identify me as a valid registrant when I visited their website providing my email id for logging in.

I discovered this goof-up after I composed an angry letter to their Support folks on how I got the successful registration mail but their website would not let me in and before I was about to hit "Send". Just out of curiosity I looked into the mail header details (by clicking on the "Show Details" link in the GMail interface). Next to my mis-spelt email address was a note - (Yes, this is you. Learn more)

And this is what I learnt from the Gmail Help Center -
"Gmail doesn't recognize dots as characters within usernames, adding or removing dots from a Gmail address won’t change the actual destination address. Messages sent to yourusername@gmail.com and y.o.u.r.u.s.e.r.n.a.m.e@gmail.com are all delivered to your Inbox, and only yours."

I was glad I discovered this & got on with my job using my email address without the dot it actually has. Looking at it from a web development perspective, it got me thinking about the consequences of using email address as login information to identify users to a website. The scenario I experienced could always repeat.