Is my email address case-sensitive?
Q
My email address is in the format Markfowlerbowes@ gmail.com. It isn’t new and has always worked okay, so far as I know. One new contact tells me, however, that he’s sent emails I’ve never received. Messages he sent were returned to him, saying the email address wasn’t found. He said he thought it might be because I have capitals in my email address, but I didn’t think these were case-sensitive? We eventually fixed it by my emailing him, and then him replying to my message. He’s since added me as a contact, and his messages now seem to get through. But do you have any idea why his earlier messages didn’t do so?
Mark Fowler-bowes
A
We’ve changed your name to protect your real email address, but the one we’ve made up reflects your real name and email.
You’re right that email addresses are ignorant of case. So, while for visual clarity you choose to style your email address as Markfowlerbowes@gmail.
com (as shown in screenshot), at the technical level this is the same address as markfowlerbowes@gmail.com.
However, we do have an inkling of what might have gone on here – and that’s your real double-barrelled surname. It includes a hyphen, but your real email address does not. That’s at least in part because Gmail itself does not support hyphens in emails, even though the global email system does (albeit with some exceptions, such as the hyphen not being directly after the @ symbol).
So, our guess is that your contact knows that your surname is doublebarrelled, and was attempting Markfowler-bowes@gmail.com or markfowler-bowes@gmail.com. Either of those would cause the message to ‘bounce’ back to the sender, with the error message your contact described.