I am receiving very often emails with a dot in the address, such as jon.doe@gmail.com, despite my actual username is without dot (jondoe).
According to Google, dots are irrelevant in Gmail addresses, that is, Google forwards jon.doe@gmail.com to jondoe@gmail.com
However, I appear to be subscribed to newsletters (such as eBay and Apple) by companies which ask for a confirmation before adding your name in their user database, so I could receive at most the initial confirmation message. I contacted Apple phone support, and a person told me that there has been an issue with Google addresses in the past, which gave the possibility to sign up with both jon.doe and jondoe usernames. She herself had my same issue and suggested to contact Google to have it fixed.
While I have not yet been able to receive answers from Google, I have found a Quora link, confirming the Apple claim regarding the dot requirement:
Somewhere around 2011ish IIRC this requirement was removed when they started ignoring dots in addresses. [...] suddenly I received email for firstlast@gmail which was the address I originally wanted.
... yes you could now be receiving someone else's email!
So, according to Google, there cannot be both a jon.doe@gmail.com and a jondoe@gmail.com user. According to other sources, this, at least in the past, was possible, implying that one can receive someone else's email. The latter seems possible, because I am receiving unsolicited emails from companies which are unlikely to spam, and one of them (Apple) confirmed this to be the problem.
Can someone confirm or disprove this?