Apparently, with gmail, putting a period (dot) in the username is meaningless.

For example, my username is “matt.stratton”. However, mail addressed to “mattstratton” gets to me as well.

This is helpful to know. Because amongst almost all of my friends, the convention of “firstnamelastname [at] gmail …

So lately several people have been bitching at me (or in general) that by using Evite, we’re exposing their email addresses to spammers.

I call shenanigans on this.

If you look at an evite, the guests invited show up as their evite username (if they’re evite users) or just the part of the email …

So I’ve seen a lot of posts on discussion boards and LJ, as well as websites, in which people are freaking out about how “evil” gmail is, and how Google is doing all these things wrong and how nobody should use it in the interests of protecting privacy.

And I’ve had about enough of this alarmist …