mugle-dev team mailing list archive

[Matt Giuca <matt.giuca@xxxxxxxxx>]

OK. Well that isn't a bug in either Gmail or Launchpad.

It's a handy (but potentially troublesome) feature in Gmail, and it's
perfectly legitimate behaviour from Launchpad.

sritchie73@xxxxxxxxx is not the same address as s.ritchie73@xxxxxxxxx, so
you can't expect Launchpad to let both of those addresses through. What if,
say, Yahoo didn't do what Gmail does, and you registered
sritchie73@xxxxxxxxx? Someone else could register s.ritchie73@xxxxxxxxx (and
if that's taken, any of the other 2^11 possibilities, excluding the
possibilities where multiple periods appear in a row) and then impersonate
you, either as a social engineering attack (pretend to be you to a human and
hope they don't notice the period) or to trick Launchpad (if Launchpad
allowed any address with the same letters but different distribution of
periods). It is therefore good that Launchpad doesn't let you do this.

Gmail on the other hand is not following standards precisely, but it's
hardly bad behaviour. Essentially, they just gave you 2^11 free email
addresses. You can think of it as them having reserved all of the other 2^11
possibilities so that nobody can use them to socially engineer on your
behalf. This doesn't necessarily mean you can use all of them
interchangeably wherever you go; just that you have all of them available to
you to use as distinct email addresses.

Anyway, if you register both of them in Launchpad, then Launchpad will
accept either (since you may have multiple addresses attached to each
Launchpad account).