Yet more noise on emails from other Sean Conners on the Intarwebs

Monday, August 17, 2026

Yet more noise on emails from other Sean Conners on the Intarwebs

It appears that someone is wrong on the Internet, and if Hacker News is anything to go by, that person is me! Or rather, it might Justin Prime who wrote that Stack Exchange post about Gmail's possibly buggy support for periods in the local part of an email address.

But one thing not brought up in the Hacker News thread is that Gmail supports custom domains. So if some other Sean Conner were to have Gmail support email for example.org, then I would expect seanconner@example.org (our hypothetical Sean Conner who is not me) to be distinct from seanconner@gmail.com (which is me). And now I have to wonder if this might be a cause for some of the issues being reported? Google is a Leviathan system with millions of moving parts where a slight mishap (like a timeout or some lost packets on a database lookup or even a bug on a system not yet updated) causes email being delivered to seanconner@example.org to end up being delivered to seanconner@gmail.com.

I'm just trying to figure out what is more likely via Occam's razor, that a large, distributed system like Google has the occational hiccup, or a surprisingly large number of people forget their email addresses, especially given how important email addresses are for account recovery, password resets, and the like? I mean, it could be both. I'm just wondering what causes the larger number of incidents now that I'm seeing I not alone in all this.

You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go ahead, I won't bite. I promise.

The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent links to that entry only. The format for the links are simple: Start with the base link for this site: https://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are interested in, say 2000/08/01, so that would make the final URL:

https://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01

You can also specify the entire month by leaving off the day portion. You can even select an arbitrary portion of time.

You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the page) the “brighter” it appears. It's an experiment in using color shading to denote the distance a link is from here. If you don't notice it, don't worry; it's not all that important.

It is assumed that every brand name, slogan, corporate name, symbol, design element, et cetera mentioned in these pages is a protected and/or trademarked entity, the sole property of its owner(s), and acknowledgement of this status is implied.