I was a proud early adopter of Gmail. September 4, 2004, to be exact. Before that, I had an email server running on an HP Unix workstation that I had named after my favorite hockey player. <Insert Canadian cultural stereotype here> That gave me the ability to create a fun email address, zin@bobbyorr.gsia.cmu.edu -- much better than my official university address, sz0h@andrew.cmu.edu (plus the "zero" was problematic since szOh looks the same in most typefaces). My account was being overrun with spam, so when I received an invitation to open a Gmail account -- yes, us cool kids got early invitations before it was available to the public -- with Google's promise of sophisticated spam filtering, I jumped at the opportunity. Now after 20 years of dedicated email use, I just switched to stan.zin@hey.com... permanently! (I checked and my Gmail archive has over 126,000 emails... no idea how many I trashed and spam-filtered over the years, but if the over-under bet on total volume was set at 1 million, I would take the over... that's a daily average of about 130? Easily!) So why switch now? Good question.
A feature of the Gmail address that I selected, became a flaw. Gmail's inability to distinguish between stan.zin@gmail.com and stanzin@gmail.com (the "dot" is there only for visual appeal) has completely destroyed my email life, giving me no real choice now but to switch. The Dalai Lama once said, "Nothing is permanent. Everything is subject to change. Being is always becoming." As I explain below, since the Dalai Lama is connected to my Gmail problems, it's fitting that he also suggests the solution.
Tibetan Buddhism is a growing religion in India. Converts get to choose a new name and སྟོན་འཛིན is a popular choice since it is the name of both the Dalai Lama and the most famous Tibetan mountain climber (and it also works across genders). Unfortunately for me, the most common English transliteration that Indians choose for that name is "Stanzin". There now seems to be a large number of people in India who are convinced that their email address is stanzin@gmail.com, probably because they forgot that Gmail attached a big number to their name when their account was created (fyi, stanzin9781@gmail.com is already taken). Naturally, Gmail sends all of these emails to my account, stan.zin@gmail.com. I get emails for Indian phone bills (call-by-call for some accounts), Uber receipts, train tickets, bank account records, dating apps, and, of course, the ubiquitous porn sites. I've been trying to filter them for 20 years, but the volume keeps growing. For example, I received about 500 spurious emails addressed to stanzin@gmail.com on my last day using Gmail. But that's not actually the biggest problem. Gmail now believes that email coming from stan.zin@gmail.com is spam, which I'm guessing is related to this identification problem. Obviously, that's the last straw. Time to move on.
Ironically, some of my research touches on an area of Decision Theory dealing with "ambiguity aversion" (an assumption that people prefer to know the relative likelihoods of random outcomes that affect the consequences of their decisions). Perhaps my "stan.zin" vs "stanzin" issue with Gmail is a natural experiment involving ambiguity. The fact that I've tolerated it for decades suggests that I'm reasonably tolerant of ambiguity. And since my stan.zin@hey.com account is costing me $99/year, maybe that's enough data for experimentalist to quantify the degree of my ambiguity aversion.
Finally, when checking the date of my Gmail adoption, I noticed that the 3rd email I received at stan.zin@gmail.com on October 7, 2004, was a spurious email addressed to stanzin@gmail.com by someone in India named Anand who I don't know:
