Propably you have gmail account. It has been released(publicly) in 2007 and since the begining offered 2 gb of space. Gmail accounts where so fast and offered so much free space that some people started using it as a alternative to the P2P network.
Gmail does not care about puncatation
Did you know that if someone sends message to youraddress@gmail.com or to y.o.u.r.a.d.d.r.e.s.s@gmail.com message always will be delivered to your email account? But dots are a little bit hard to remember. You can always use +sign with your email address e.g youraddress+steemit@gmail.com to register on steemit. You can use plus in the multiple ways, add service name at the end and you will know which one sold your data to other companies. Also it is great feature when service says 'that email already exists in our database' you can bypass warning and register with the same email address! Gmail intention was to filter spamers you can modify your email address with dots or plus and then create filter rule in your gmail account to automatically move your emails to another folders
