Gmail accepts multiple forms of email addresses for a single account. first.last@gmail.com is identical to firstlast@gmail.com. I often get subscribed to email lists I don't want using a variant of Gmail address that I never use. Also, plenty of people using forwarding addresses; it may not be clear which address was the target.
What you're saying is odd, because I own a first.last@gmail.com email address and I know the person that owns the equivalent firstlast@gmail.com email address.
Also, the email address to which the message was sent appears clearly in the "To:" header.
Either you or your friend is misspelling their address (more common than you might think, I get opt-in mailing-list mail for myaddress@gmail.com, intended for myaddress@ymail.com), or you've encountered a bug.
You can put periods inside the username part of a gmail address and it still gets through. I'm not sure how what you're saying could be true? Maybe it wasn't always this way.
I thought it was the other way around: mail to firstlast@gmail.com will be delivered to first.last@gmail.com unless firstlast@gmail.com was registered early on.
Google's own google-content-api-for-shopping@googlegroups.com mailing list has this as the "To:" field:
google-content-api-for-shopping@googlegroups.com
And at the bottom of the message:
To unsubscribe from this group, send an empty message.
I had to ctrl-u and check the "Delivered-To:" and "X-Forwarded-For:" headers before I could unsubscribe.
(I'd tried to unsubscribe previously but the subscribed email account forwards to my main account so replying with an empty message didn't work. This thread prompted me to dig a little deeper and finally get one less piece of email per day - thanks HN!)
The errors I saw (before giving up) would not be caught by a spell check. I'll go so far as guessing that a blind spell check was run, with no human check on the corrections.
Or English isn't their first language. That was my impression. Granted, I bailed partly because of the grammar, too but that was after realizing it was a mixed list of soft skills, not algorithms or tools or whatever. Once it wasn't what I expected, the writing didn't help keep me.
The app doesn't deal with corporate hierarchies. For example, it correctly identifies Cheerios as supporting SOPA, but not Gold Medal flour; each is labeled as "distributed by General Mills Sales".
