I don't know if this is still accurate but for a long while Gmail was set up so that you could have name@gmail as your regular email and then do a "dot alias" to identify where the email came from. So Name.FoodLion@gmail would still deliver to your regular email address but it would show the dot designation. So now when food Lion sells your data to some other company and you start getting non food lion emails using that Food Lion address you know who sold your data.