“I finally realized that this email is to I normally use with no dots. However, when he followed through and took a closer look, he noticed that the card number associated with the account was not his. He received a legitimate email from Netflix earlier this year, telling him his account was on hold and advising him to update his payment details. That’s a potential problem.Īs reported by the Register, this discrepancy almost tricked a developer, called James Fisher, into adding his card details to someone else’s Netflix account. This means that, if someone was to email or even the message would still be sent to other sites and services, such as Netflix, do recognise dots in email addresses, and would consider an account registered to and an account registered to to be completely separate. For example, if your email is you own all dotted versions of your address.” As the company explains, “If someone accidentally adds dots to your address when emailing you, you’ll still get that email. Google’s email service famously doesn’t recognise dots in email addresses. A Gmail quirk could open up users who have a dot in their email address to phishing attacks.