The reason I suggest it is that the "dots don't matter" behavior has been in Gmail for a while. I'd be surprised to find that they assigned two people the "same" username. Anecdotally, I've actually had people sign up to websites using one of my email addresses (ie: a random person used one of my Gmail accounts as the backup email address on his Gmail account).
As of today, my account is associated with seven addresses--that is, seven people said my email address was their alternative email address. 2,000 messages in the spam folder over ~1 month. Sometimes a dozen can hit my inbox per day; But, I'm guessing these are legit newsletters that people use my address for. And someone in South America used it to sign up for a facebook account. I was getting slammed with his friend requests and lost password requests until I just filtered them out.
sigh ... Rant over, and I feel better.
If one of these emails has his phone number, call him. If not, contact e.g. a bank that sends email to him, tell them "you've got the email wrong. Please notify your client because I have no way of reaching him, and you probably do". The fraud department of the bank will be able to take care of that quickly - you can start with "either this is a fraud, or a mistake, but here's the story ..." when you talk to them.
It might be helpful to tell them (and hopefully relay to him) that this is YOUR email address, you've had it for a while.
Expect the guy to ask you to sign over your email address to him, because his name is "Joe None" and your violating his property, or something crazy like that. Don't get angry, and definitely don't do anything stupid like impersonating him, logging in to his bank account or anything like that.
This is not legal advice, and I hope you won't need any after you do the right thing and try to resolve this....
The dot is a distraction in this case. He is passing out your email address, thinking it is his. When he does this, you get emails intended for him. This is not a technical problem, and doesn't really have a technical solution.
The dots are superficial -- you can add them or remove them as you want. The login form for gmail even respects this, as I can add or subtract dots however I want.
My email address is barry.melton -- I can send and receive email as barrymelton as well, or b.a.r.rymelton, or barry.melt.on or whatever.
Short Story: There's been an 'urban legend' that people from the early gmail invite days could register the same email, the only difference being dots. The more likely scenario is that he's filling in the wrong email on web forms, it's emailing you, and it's not emailing him at all. He doesn't have access to the email.
Is there anything that proves he also has access to a dot-version of the email account? You being sent emails from banks only proves that he's filling that email into a form, not that he has access to the account.
If the email seems to be personal, I respond and ask them to have "Natelie" contact me, but she never has.
I agree with you, it's very frustrating. I don't have any solution, but I'll be following this thread closely.
My gmail account has been around since invite beta.
I figure that somewhere along the lines google changed their system from dotted and non-dotted addresses being unique and accounts made before this have been affected.
I've probably gotten HUNDREDS of e-mails for noahclark@gmail.com (I can tell by checking the to field) in my noah.clark@gmail.com. I know where he lives, what type of art he collects, major purchases, and some pretty significant family issues as well as the homework he has been assigned.
I just do my best to notify who ever sent the e-mail that they have the wrong address.
All this is assuming that the other guy cannot get into this "common" gmail account and you are not enjoying looking at all the other emails that you get.
