Some of this is undoubtedly typos, particularly of the type where someone has an address with a number on the end, and has forgotten to put on the number. (I have the number-free version courtesy of being among the first to get invite codes, which is why I get so much of this stuff.) But over the last couple of weeks, I've also had a fair number of password retrieval attempts sent to the not-Gmail address linked to the account, with a timing which is pretty suggestive of someone having given a site my Gmail address, logging in to pick up their order details, and discovering that they *can't* log in -- and not realising that the reason for this is that it's not their address.

I suspect that part of the problem here is that as far as Gmail is concerned, all variations of dots within an address are one identical account, and ditto with the Gmail and Googlemail namespaces. Thus I use jules.jones@gmail, but this also give me control of julesjones@gmail and jules.jones@googlemail and julesjones@googlemail -- but the "set up an account" page at Gmail used to be not very clear on the "does this already exist?" checker if someone tried one of the subsidiary versions, and they thought they'd successfully set up an account using that version when they hadn't. The checker is much better now, but there are probably still a number of people out there with the wrong address in their address book as a result of old attempts.