Gmail oddity

[BigV]

I have a gmail account, and I love it. Very widely accessible, uncluttered interface, free, generous capacity, etc. I use it for my main non-work account. But that doesn't mean I don't use it at work. Often I need a different perspective on our in house email system, and this very neatly fills that need. The other day, I received a message addressed to my gmail account, which I monitor with my Outlook 2003 client (mostly, sometimes I use the web interface), and I noticed something strange.

My gmail address is Big.V at gmail dot com, if my name were Big V. Normally that's the address that appears in the To: field when I check those messages. But this slightly different address turned up: BigV at gmail dot com. Weird. So, after some testing, I discovered that while the web login is very strict, allowing only Big.V and Big.V at gmail dot com as the login names, I was able to receive mail at that account addressed to Big.V and BigV and B.igV and B.i.g.V and all other similar permutations thereof. No examples where there were two or more dots in a row were successful. But the interior single dots (periods) seemed to be treated as just so much whitespace.

Has anyone else had this experience? Care to explain why? Why is the login strict but the addressing less so? I'm curious.