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? -- Peter King peter.king@utoronto.ca Department of Philosophy 170 St. George Street #521 The University of Toronto (416)-978-3311 ofc Toronto, ON M5R 2M8 CANADA http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/ ========================================================================= GPG keyID 0x7587EC42 (2B14 A355 46BC 2A16 D0BC 36F5 1FE6 D32A 7587 EC42) gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 7587EC42