On Sat, Aug 10, 2024 at 07:02:13PM -0400, Peter King via talk wrote:
I just was in an extended argument with my two daughters, about something I suspect might be a generational thing. Let me know what you think.
So the discussion started with me complaining that "because" Google respects neither uppercase/lowercase nor punctuation in their email, I get lots of email addressed to people whose email is similar to mine. I myself have always thought that the problem was that Google's email address parser did not respect these differences, as they should, and so I wind up receiving email meant for someone in Great Britain with a similar name.
My daughters argued vigorously that this is not a bug but a feature -- you wouldn't want people to have to pay attention to either cases or punctuation when you write your email!
I replied that back when there was a net but no web of course you paid attention to these differences: we were all trained as programmers to be careful about punctuation and case. (Hell, I learned on punch cards.)
Their view was that this was a dumb view and that I wasn't in fact getting email for everyone who signed up for email with some version of peter.king.1@gmail.com, but also peterking1@gmail.com, peterking.1@gmail.com, and so on, but only when other people -- like, say, peter.king.11@gmail.com -- mistyped their email addresses when signing up for some service or other (for instance leaving off the last digit).
The discussion was inconclusive, to say the least, and I thought (and think!) that we should respect case and punctuation. But I certainly hadn't considered the arguments against it...
Thoughts? Experiences with gmail? Reflections on generational differences in the approach to computing?
Some early computer systems did not have upper and lower case, just one of them. You used to be able to login to linux with your username in uppercase and the terminal would switch to all uppercase mode. I haven't checked lately if that still works. But as a result, domain names and email names are not case sensitive. In fact it would be awful is John@gmail.com and john@gmail.com were two different emails. As for punctuation, some systems care, some don't. Google decided it was more reliable to ignore it. They of course also allow you to use username+keyword@gmail.com so you can filter based on the keyword part if you use different +keyword parts when signing up for things different places. Unfortunately a lot of web developers incorrectly claim + isn't a valid character in an email address, which it most certainly is. So no, we definitely should NOT care about case in identifiers. Too error prone. Soemtimes I will write my email on forms in upper case just because people sometimes think the l is an I. So L makes it clear. -- Len Sorensen