I just learned that:

Insert one or several dots (“.”) anywhere in your email address. Gmail doesn’t recognize periods as characters in addresses — we just ignore them. For example, you could tell people your address was hikingfan@gmail.com, hiking.fan@gmail.com or hi.kin.g.fan@gmail.com. (We understand that there has been some confusion about this in the past, but to settle it once and for all, you can indeed receive mail at all the variations with dots.)

If that isn’t weird I don’t know what is! Perhaps I don’t know enough about email in general, but I always assumed that if my Gmail address was w.xyz@gmail.com that wxyz@gmail.com would NOT come to me — actually, I really wouldn’t have ever even assumed that — it just seems ridiculous that it would be so!

When I first discovered this, I was not happy. I thought I was being “safer” by having a dot in one of the “utility” gmail accounts that I use. Oh well. So much for that idea.

I guess the more I site here and think about it though, I actually like it. Go figure. 

In fact, there is another strange Gmail trick you can do to your email address — adding the “+” sign. So if you’re email address is MyAddress@gmail.com, you could use MyAddress+Bank@gmail.com when you signed up for your online banking. You could then easily search for and/or filter for those messages within Gmail. Handy!

Thanks Gmail. I was mad at ya when I started this post, but I’m back on the team now.