Wow. That’s a design choice, all right.
They didn’t want bad actors to take a version of the address with different dots. I think it’s mostly a good choice.
I have that exact same problem and have for many years. It’s really annoying. The worst was when my alter ego got an email from a sheriff’s office (in the UK) to register as a sex offender 
Never had that problem in Gmail, but I did once work for a very large corporation (40,000 employees worldwide) and one other person at the same company had the exact same first and last name as me, except with one letter different in the first name. Since our email addresses were firstname.lastname@domain it was very common for people to send stuff to the wrong guy.
Thank goodness neither of us got the other in trouble accidentally.
How does someone think they own a particular email address when they don’t? Don’t they notice they’re not receiving anything to that address? When I can, I cancel appointments for them. I figure if that happens often enough, they’ll figure out the problem.
Ah. That does make some sense, but they could have just made dots a forbidden character to achieve the same result without this potential confusion (or is there some issue with that that I’m not seeing)
I know somebody who experienced that sort of in reverse. She has a very common first and last name and constantly gets emails from various people looking for others.
She even eventually befriended a social sewing group in a different state who made that mistake. But when she told them “hey, this isn’t her email. Maybe you should let her know she’s not getting these messages”, within a few minutes she got an email from one of them saying “Firstname, did you know you weren’t getting our emails?” 
I have a friend who shares a first name and a last name with a child psychologist who specializes in kids recovering from abuse and trauma. She’s gotten some really horrific emails, she tells me
Yeah, I tried a few times to get a message to them via some companies they got invoices from, etc, but nothing has ever worked. It’s been going on for over a decade now. They’re either fucked in the head or using my email as a dummy account on purpose.
That psychologist really needs to address this, given the privacy violations.
I once had a phone number that was an anagram of the number for a “pain clinic” = Oxycontin / fentanyl pill mill.
I got lots of voicemails of strung out junkies pouring out their tales of woeful suffering and ending with a pitiful plea for the good doc to provide a scrip for more of the Good Stuff.
That reminds me of when I worked technical support for a medical software company. One of the other tech support guys who was just over a couple of cubicles from me had a direct phone line that was just one digit away from the phone number you can call to talk to a prisoner. I can’t remember which prison it was.
He used to get a lot of confused and angry calls from people who didn’t understand why he couldn’t put them through, and didn’t believe him that they had dialed the wrong number. I felt bad for that guy but at the same time it was pretty funny.
I wish that one day he could have said, “This isn’t a prison, but it is a cubicle for a software company, so it might be worse.” I don’t think any of the callers would have appreciated it though.
But they wouldn’t have ever been able to go through the steps to create that account so why would they think it’s theirs?
They think email addresses are automatically assigned, like phone numbers and SSNs?
Especially if they’re forgetful. If they don’t recall having to apply for those, they might assume these things are just assigned by some bureaucracy.
That’s assuming they even think that deeply about it. It could be nothing more than “That’s my name, so of course that’s my e-mail address”.
It’s really the various companies’ fault for not verifying email addresses before, say, sending me bills, contracts, receipts, pictures of drivers licenses, credit rejections, job rejections, travel plans,
and so on, all things I’ve received because people think my email address is theirs.
It’s a pretty bad privacy violation for, say, an insurance company to send me someone’s contract, including their address and phone number, before sending a verify link.
I’ve reached out to people on their phones when their number is included to let them know and ask if they want anything forwarded. I don’t know how many Walmart, Target, shopping, and other accounts I’ve closed down that were signed up with my address, again with no verification. Terrible security on the part of the companies.
For years, whenever I got a phone call from the alumni office at my alma mater, they’d start out by asking me if my email address was still _____, which was a variant of my first and last name at yahoo.com. Which would be plausible, but I’ve never had a Yahoo email address. And every time, I’d tell them so, and they never changed it. Apparently, the only use they had for an email address was as an icebreaker to lead in to “So, how much money do you want to donate?”.
You should end the conversation right then and there on that note, saying they must have reached the wrong person. That might prompt them to change the script.