GMail Bug! Buggers!!

Noticed a very interesting bug in GMAIL.

Lets say my email id is amitdas@gmail.com

Now the bug – If I send a mail to amitdas@gmail.com, it reaches me… if I send it to amit.das@gmail.com it reaches me, if I send it to amitd.as@gmail.com or ami.tdas@gmail.com it still reaches me!

Hmm… problem with that?  Well.. I don’t own amit.das@gmail.com, or amitd.as@gmail.com, for instance. So, my guess is that whoever owns that particular id would be receiving my mails. And I say that there have been a few mails that I end up being the unintended receipient of! Poor kid! Thats 1.7GB worth of mails in his mailbox! And a lot of crap that I am sure he doesn’t want to use! For me, it could be compromising my personal information! Woooo! I am scared!!

Anyways – the next thing I do is try and check if other email ids (a.mitdas etc) are available. Thankfully, they are not!  It could mean that I am worrying unnecessarily. amitdas being taken my imply amit.das is also taken. BUT, it could also mean that someone figured it out before me, and is misusing this bug! or securing himself! Eitherways, the truth is out there!

Here is the response from Google Team, when I reported the bug (look at the list of most relevant questions in response to the reported bug! hmph!) –

Re: [#138335018] Bug with email ids (amit.das is the same as amitdas)   

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Apr 20 

Hello,

Thank you for taking the time to send us your comments and concerns.

This is an automated response with information related to your message.
We’re not able to respond personally to all inquiries, but we’ve provided
links to the most common issues at the end of this message. If the
information in our Help Center doesn’t address your specific concern, we
also suggest visiting the discussion group at
http://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Help-Discussion, where you can post
questions, find answers, and share helpful tips and tricks with other
Gmail users.

We’ve also forwarded any comments and suggestions to the appropriate
teams. Your feedback and feature requests are important to us, and we do
read each one.

Help with technical issues can be found at
https://mail.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=troubleshooter.cs&problem=bugflow

Sincerely,

The Google Team

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I WANT TO CHANGE MY USERNAME
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=8158

WHERE IS THE LINK TO INVITE FRIENDS TO JOIN GMAIL?
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=7403

I WANT MORE INVITATIONS
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=7403

I CAN’T OPEN THE ‘INVITE A FRIEND TO JOIN GMAIL!’ LINK
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=8774

I SENT AN INVITE TO THE WRONG ADDRESS
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=10297

AN INVITATION I SENT NEVER ARRIVED
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=10297

I WANT TO ACCESS MY GMAIL ACCOUNT WITH ANOTHER MAIL CLIENT
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=10350

I WANT TO SIGN UP FOR GMAIL
https://www.google.com/accounts/SmsMailSignup1