Discussion on:

Quick tip: Dots are meaningless in your Gmail address

Because other free email providers dodistinguish between them. Because -- and rightly so -- they understand that punctuation matters.

What's next... saying that it doesn't matter whether your password is case-sensitive, because "the letters are the same"?

Most other providers do look at the dots. With email, addresses are not case sensitive anywhere so that Albert.Einstein@someisp.com, albert.einstein@someisp.com and ALBERT.EINSTEIN@SOMEISP.COM are all the same. Passwords, however, are almost universally case-sensitive, so that MyPassword, mypassword and MYPASSWORD would be 3 separate passwords

Did Mark Kalein graduate from high school? The punctuation marks are "periods', not "dots". Kalein probably writes "pee" when he means "urinate". A pox on all those who contribute to the dumbing down of discourse...

So when did things become "period com" not "dot com" - a period is a female's cycle innit? If you are going to be pendantic it is a full stop not a dot.

Full stop in UK; period in US

But full stop happened in the UK about 50 years ago.

the punctuation mark to show the end of a sentence and is to be followed by a blank space before the first letter of the next sentence. Since an email address is NOT a sentence then it can not be a punctuation mark and not a period. It is a dot as in the use of a dot to indicate something in a list or similar type non-sentence type usage.

Oh, and as Eric reminds us, it's only in the USA that a sentence is finished with a period, most other countries call it a full stop.

What about a rolling stop?

That's a cop draw,
for sure, for sure.

A semi colon is more like a quarter-stop,
with a colon as a half-stop.

Dots is the terminology used by Google - so that is what I used. You'll get better response around here if you assume a more professional posture. This is not a Call of Duty forum.

Using dots in differing ways within your GMail address can aid in filtering mail. Placing a dot between first and last name allows one to create a rule for filing email based upon what address it was sent to without needing to create multiple accounts for receiving email.

However as a common user I don't understand what the author want to say.

I have had problems now and then where when entering my GMAIL address which does have a dot/period in it, has returned an error as an illegal address by random firms. I can only guess that they do not have a savy web master or something, in any case I've had to use an alternate email.

This issue is quite a pain - my husband receives emails often which are addressed to someone who set up their account with a dot in it, which ends up being my husbands email without the dot. The sad thing is that these are important emails, like reservation confirmations and the like. Sometimes he gets personal emails too, and we've told those people to alert their friend about the email address mixup, but he still seems to use it on occasion!