There are some doubts that you might have for long, but couldn’t find any definite answers to them. One of them happens while dealing with an email address and its case sensitive nature. Email addresses consist of two parts, the first half before the ‘@’ sign is the username whereas the part after the ‘@’ sign is the domain name.
So does it make any difference if we send an email to receiver@example.com, RECEIVER@EXAMPLE.COM or to Receiver@Example.com? That is, will the intended mail will even get delivered, and if yes then to whom. Let’s have a look at all these scenarios in detail. Moreover, you could even forward multiple emails at once in Gmail. Don’t forget to check out this handy tip.
Email Address and Case Sensitivity
There exists no definite and concrete evidence whether an email address is case sensitive or not. But in the majority of cases, it doesn’t matter whether the alphabets are in lower case or upper (focus on the word “majority”). That is most of the times it doesn’t matter whether you send an email to receiver@example.com, RECEIVER@EXAMPLE.COM or to Receiver@Example. So you may try sending the email on any of three address and the same person will receive the email.
But in some rare cases, there exists an exception. As already mentioned, the email address consists of a username and domain name. The latter is case insensitive, that is for sure. Hence user@GMAIL.COM, user@Gmail.com, and user@gmail.com are one and the same thing. It is not only applicable to Gmail but across all the email clients (Outlook, etc) or even if you create your own using GSuite.
The issue between email address and case sensitive arises with the username part, i.e. the part before the ‘@’ sign. Are user@gmail.com and USER@gmail.com the same? Well, it depends. In most cases, the answer is YES. If you send the email to any of the two addresses, the same person is going to receive it. So could we generalize that the username is also case insensitive?
Not exactly! This is because there is no hard and fast rule for the same. Still, to avoid any confusion, many famous email clients like Gmail, Outlook or GSuite for that matter ignore case sensitiveness. So they treat RECEIVER@gmail.com, receiver@gmail.com, and Receiver@gmail.com as the same ID.
But some large MNCs which have their own domains, sometimes prefer to keep the username part of email address case-sensitive. This is because it might happen that two or more people may have the same name. In those cases, to segregate the users, they assign an email ID with case-sensitiveness. But that stands for rare cases and should not be generalized.
Conclusion
In near about all cases, your message will be delivered. It doesn’t matter if you send it to receiver@example.com, RECEIVER@EXAMPLE.COM or to Receiver@Example. So next time to forget to turn off the Caps Lock, don’t use the Backspace key and continue writing the email address in all its glory. To conclude, email address, in general, is not case sensitive.
Tip: Even full stops doesn’t make any difference to your email address, but only with the username part. So user@example.com and u.s.e.r@example.com are one and the same thing.
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