My wife owns an email address in Gmail and you wouldn't think it was a very popular email address. Until of course someone's account information at numerous shopping sites began showing up. My wife contacted this person by phone and it turned out to be an elderly woman. The elderly woman was not having it and began arguing with my wife about whose email address it was. The elderly woman ranted on and on about HOW DARE MY WIFE TAKE HER EMAIL ADDRESS!?*@4@~!
She just didn't get it and more and more new accounts began showing up.
When that didn't work, I tracked down one of her relatives on Facebook, who happened to be younger so she got the whole Internet thing, and explained that her elderly grandmother (it turns out) was using an address that didn't belong to her. Her granddaughter told me she would talk to her grandma and tell her how silly she was being and promised to explain how her grandma could keep herself safe while shopping online.
No new accounts in the grandma's name have shown up since...
I shared a story in another thread recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24307375) about my relatively benign Gmail being misused, but I had forgotten about the really weird encounter I had a couple of years ago.
A woman texted me via iMessage that she was calling out sick to her job at a local public school. I replied that I hoped she felt better, but clearly had a wrong number.
She insisted that I was Joanna, an Occupational Therapist at this school. (Emma gave me this number!). Clearly I was not, and did not know Emma, or any of the other things that were going on. Then she accused me of stealing Joanna's phone number.
Turns out -- if you send an iMessage to someone in your Contacts, it does the first lookup by email, NOT by phone number. By assuming Joanna had my email address -- something lots of people seem to think is theirs -- I ended up also getting their iMessages.
I've had a similar experience quite recently. I started getting legit automated emails for someone named "John", some emails regarding an effort to buy a house, others from a doctor's office. Some of the emails looked rather important, such as doctor appointment details, so I engaged in some Internet sleuthing, and in a few days I found the person. They were an elderly gent who had the same Gmail handle as me, but his with a numeral suffix.
I tried emailing the gent to explain, but received no reply. So I've just been forwarding those emails to the fellow's real address when they arrive. Perhaps he never checks email, hence his lack of reply to my earlier note, but I forward just in case.
Ugh, this is my life. Yes, including accusations of “hacking” when someone signed up for Facebook with my email.
On the plus side, this personal experience made me very adamant about protecting mistakenly-registered users at my employer. When we were planning to add logged in accounts to our service, the sales team (understandably!) wanted the signup process to be as frictionless as possible, and thought that new users should be able to start putting data into their account as soon as they registered. I insisted that we require email verification before allowing users to enter personal data. When I got resistance to my plan, I logged into my webmail and showed the team all the crazy email I got from people who’d mis-entered my address, and suddenly they understood. I wasn’t just inventing some bizarre, unlikely edge case: these things really happen, and often.
Edit: And as you might guess if you squint at my username, my name isn’t super common. It’s not unique on the planet, but it’s certainly not “Smith”. If I have to deal with all this, I bet the Smiths of the world find it nightmarish.
My main email address is <myreallastname>@gmail.com. My surname is not a very common one, yet I still experience many of the side effects described here. I've had this account since the first day Gmail was available to the public, April 1st 2004—I was invited by a friend who worked for Google at the time.
Back then, I never considered this address an "OG" address, but then around 2012 I noticed something funny. I volunteered to do some charity work and everyone was asked to sign in to a log book and write down their email address with a pen. Several people who worked for this charity said to me "How did you get that email address?" and seemed to think it was unusual that I had a Gmail address that was simply my last name. When I asked them what their email address was, they'd say something like "fluffybunny32428@hotmail.com" or something like that. Hard to believe people use those kinds of addresses for official business and applying for jobs, but they do.
My name is also very English. So when I get missent email, almost everybody using my address is from the UK, Canada, Australia, or NZ.
I have a firstname.lastname Gmail account. Neither frst or last are particularly common. There are various people around the planet who hand out my address as there own, I get invoices on a regular basis but also correspondence from real estate agents and legal correspondence. Most recently I spam listed a Canadian telco because some gentleman in Canada is joyfully handing out my address. On the other hand I very rarely get someone else's snail mail and if I do it is for a neighbour I know a house or two away and never someone in another country :-)
One of my Gmail addresses is <my first name>@gmail.com and I never get interesting titbits intended for other people.
Mind you, it probably helps that my first name and surname are pretty unusual. I've also got <my first name>@yandex.com, <my surname>@yandex.com, plus the <my first name>.net and <my surname>.net domain names. So I've pretty much cornered the market in being uniquely identifiable online, for anyone who knows me.
Hmmm... maybe I should se if <my surname>@gmail.com is available, just to really tie up the loose ends!
UPDATE: Hmmm... <my surname>@gmail.com has already been taken, so I can't complete the set. Chances are I actually set it up myself a long while back and then never bothered to use it, but I'm buggered if I can remember the password.
Most people with average computer literacy has no choice but to use the fluffybunny32428 style email addresses.
To get a good email address these days you either have to be very early at jumping on a new email service or you have to be skilled enough to use your own domain.
I too have lastname @ gmail, and I find that many people with the same surname as me, and who have firstname.lastname @gmail don't know the difference between a period and a space in an email address.
I'm lucky. I have <firstname>.<lastname>@gmail.com, I haven't had a single case of misuse.
On the other hand, it appears my name is unique in the world. The only things I've ever found under my name that weren't written by me appear to be people scraping for content and trashing the format--I've found plenty of examples of words attributed to me that were really quotes.
Same here. Unfortunately my distant cousins of more advanced age, and my mother, and even my brothers (all of whom have emails only one character off from my own) sometimes mistype. I suspect some groups incorrectly transcribe signups from paper forms as well.
I occasionally try to remedy the issues, but I have yet to convince my mother to fix the email on her bank account.
I have two such gmail accounts! I got one early on—around 2005 or 2006 which receives a gross ton of spam, so eventually replaced it with one that uses my initials and then my last name which is way less trouble. I got my brother on board around the same time. He just uses our last name at gmail. I'm sure he gets his share of crap.
Yup, I feel your pain. One of my emails is <onechar>@<3chars>.com. This fails verification on so many websites it's just comical. I then figured on making a <6chars>@<3chars>.com. Turns out folks mostly validate <3chars>.com in my experience, which I assume is because of good old mail.com. It's frustrating.
I gave up using mail@<nickname>.network because of the significant percentage of sites that refuse the .network TLD.
One large financial services provider even told me that their "policy" was to allow 3, 4, or 5 characters as the last part of the domain. So .ninja is A-OK. I pointed out how ludicrous this was, and they told me it was their "policy" again, and that's why Australian Super doesn't have any of my money.
I have something similar when I used contact@<firstname>.<lastname>.name
There were various ways in which that failed.
1. ".name" was pretty new by then, so some frontends did not accept it
2. some frontends objected to the third level of my domain part, accepting third levels only in such cases as the well know. ".co.uk" for example
3. some frontends let me sign up, but something in the backend failed, I can only suspect if it was the ".name" tld or my third level, but I never got any mails after signing up
Similar experience with IDN domains. Most places altogether reject them, but those which accept them, only a subset accept IDN recipient in the mail address.
I was once directed to appear at a Las Vegas hotel lobby at 7 AM sharp. I was to drive various poker celebrities from shoot to shoot around the city for a movie. Included was a detailed itinerary. I recognized the names from various TV poker shows.
I wonder what happened when I didn't show up (I did let them know that I wouldn't be there), and I wonder if it was ever finished and released.
Yes, I also get the bills (mostly from electricians in Australia for some reason) the porn/game signups, the notes from Grampa, etc.
I happened to be online the moment outlook.com launched and registered a <very popular first name (it's even the name of a disciple and/or one of The Beatles)>@outlook.com email address and walked away from it exactly because of this.
Over a decade ago, I was added to a Sri Lanken family tree thing on Ancestry - because they invited my email address, as we have the same last name (my last name though is Norwegian, and the same as this sri lanken family.
I still get updates in my email from this family and even had bank statement updates sent to me. and birthday wishes mean for the other sstave...
I have told them multiple times - but I am still on their family tree - for a DECADE
I have Firstname.Lastname@gmail but I never get any mistaken mail there.
Now text messages on the other hand... I get all sorts, at one point I was getting some for a Black Gun group. Now I am getting them from the DNC but they are address to the wrong name.
The scarier thing is two factor authorization text messages, I remember getting some for Facebook and Instagram. I never did anything with them but if not set up right I suppose I could get into someone else's account.
I was once the (proud) owner of `ozzy@ibm.net` at some point in the mid-late nighties.
I was living in Istanbul for awhile and IBM had just entered the market to bring us all Internet, and decided to use their `ibm.net` domain to give all their customers free email.
Hah - not as bad but similar, but hey it’s my name-ish. I get a fairly high amount of password reset attempts on it too. (guess my Gmail address, I got gmail back when it was invite only beta)
Really like your approach at work though, I am apparently signed up to so many various services that I have never heard of, and could probably access lots of PII if I wanted to.
My email account got 'hacked' by the Chinese (not really hacked, just reused the same password). From there they broke into multiple other accounts by password recovery. I got control of the account back. But few years later, someone used my email to register at some Singaporean university. Since then I keep receiving emails from multiple departments telling me about exams and my lack of attendance.
I have <name><number>@gmail.com. Despite the number, I still get emails about other people’s bank accounts, parcels being shipped to them, the occasional missent scan…
I have one of these accounts (it's a dictionary word), and I can confirm everything the author has said is true. I receive constant onboarding emails I can't opt out of, "so and so thinks you're cute" dating profile notifications, weekly account recovery notifications, all kinds of random crap that was meant for someone else but due to slight misspellings come to me, such as important contracts from lawyers, endless spam and newsletters I will never be able to escape. I've long given up trying to help others deal with mistakenly using my email. It sucks massively and has made my email unusable. Had I known this when I registered my email, I probably would have thought twice about being cute and registering it. These days, I mostly use my own domain for email and carry on.
Sorry to hear that. As a fellow 'OG' gmail user, I feel your pain, but between the constant 2-3 daily unsubscribe hits and many many Gmail filters it is actually manageable and usable.
Google's "targeted-journalist-level" Advanced Protection Program means I don't have to worry about password resets or account recovery stuff on the account.
Though I have lost track of the number of services I didn't have immediate access to since someone signed up using my email address, and reclaiming it can be a battle sometimes. The Apple ID was interesting - but luckily everyone's "first pet's name" was "Fido"... (Seriously... Please validate your emails everyone!!!)
Often, whenever a real mailing address is included I print out the email and send it in a real letter with a friendly (if just a tad passive-aggressive) note inside. But overall I try to do the right thing for important documents and correspondence.
I do shudder to think how many random accounts are just an email-password-reset away from having access though...
I got on Google's APP a while ago. Google is great for this specific purpose - if there's one thing you can count on Google for, it's never ever listening to their customers, no matter what.
I don't have the same degree of problems with first initial + family name @ gmail (with an uncommon family name), but I've had someone use it for something related to car insurance (which has resulted in a _ton_ of spam), to enter a university run, and had company internal documents forwarded to me (turns out the CEO shares my name).
My wife and I have "OG" name based gmail addresses. We only get about 5 emails a week not to us nowadays, but we have also given up trying to route the stuff to people. Somehow we've made it onto government distro lists, business travel itinerary lists and the normal distros.
The worst was when my wife began receiving outage alerts from a Fortune 100 company's NOC. Not just simple Nagios alerts, but detailed technical information accompanying the alert. When we attempted to notify their security team they threatened us for having "hacked" their system. Turns out they realized a former employee added their personal address to the distro when they left so they could help with the transition.
I've got [first initial][last initial]@[my email provider] and have come to find much of the mail I receive seems to be addressed to people with the same initials as myself. It's incredibly frustrating to find the same culprits over and over again. Do they not know their own email address? Or do they just not care? (I suspect the latter)
Indeed. Mine is firstnamelastname, and I've gotten many emails I shouldn't. The worst was an excel spreadsheet with login details for several dozen midlevel managers at a small banking chain.
Yeah, I have the same type of email, and I received legal and medical documents, letters from schools about students, tons of personal notes, and daily signups for services.
OMG some guy has signed me up for EVERYTHING from Home Depot to every dating site, to porn sites to cheating sites. It's absurd. I get daily emails from these services still even with unsubscribes and blocks. They're insessant.
Same. People signing up for various services, apparently not understanding that they will never be able to read anything sent to this email address.
I get emails from middle schools, online shopping of course, but also emails for at least a couple Trump supporters (not trying to profile; simply getting Trump campaign's constant barrage of emails demanding more money; nothing from Joe's side yet)
What I find particularly annoying is when parents use this account to register for a kid's school alerts. All sort of important stuff like "Do not send your kid to school this week!" or "Where did your kid go?" and because the school itself is also not super savvy, there is nowhere for me to send a reply saying "You need to fix this!"
Due to a bug, for a few months I received email addressed to google@gmail.com. This was years ago, when Gmail was still newish.
I couldn't send mail from that address, but I sure did receive it. An endless torrent of weird junk, and a surprising amount of personal data, business secrets, and passwords. If I was maliciously minded I could have done a lot of damage.
I spent those months trying to find any way to get a message into Google to fix it, and only eventually succeeded when I learned a friend-of-a-friend actually worked there, and they helped un-scramble my account.
Story time: I never considered my email to be OG as it contains at least two digits after firstLast but I've experienced the same thing. A man very well off man from Texas has assumed my email as his own, shared it with his entire extended family and booked hotels and flights using it.
At some point both his wife has asked me what I thought about a forwarded message from their mortgage broker and his brother in-law asked me my input on buying a 30ft yacht and what to name it.
I always ignore the serious ones for obvious ethical reasons but can't help myself with the more innocent cases. I've found I quite enjoy giving non-commital responses to these emails that won't give up the gig but also don't help them either, things like: "that seems pricey" or "cool! What are you going to name her?", and "she's a beaut!".
Oh god yes. I have a 6 character pronouncable gmail address as my main email address. Some highlights:
* Several people from (I think) Mexico City have sent me requests in Spanish asking for medical prescriptions, including photos of their current medication.
* I started receiving receipts for an Italian parking fee app. After I contacted their support about the problem, I received an email addressed to their user asking them to confirm the email address.
* Someone signed up for Comcast DSL and there was no way to opt out of those emails, support didn't react and logging into the account would have required additional information not in the emails. I finally made a complaint to the FTC under the CAN SPAM act - that got their attention and they managed to fix the issue.
* Someone signed up for some rewards program and proceeded to collect points by signing up for about 10 different newsletters.
I have my 6 letter surname at gmail as well, and I've had this issue for decades. Everything from wedding invitations to banking to schools etc.
I have answered some helpfully if I had the time, but mostly ignored them and put them in a folder as "mail for others".
One in particular, some kid in Arizona who shares my last name has signed up for everything from golf to Epic Games. I found him on facebook and friended (since we shared our last name) and politely asked him if he could try to not use my email for things. He told me it was his, called me a creep and blocked me.
It's kind of hilarious how many people insist the email I (or Google I suppose) own is also theirs, despite the technical impossibility of that scenario. The same has happened with my phone number.
Fun fact: Facebook logs people in if they click on a link in their transactional emails. Don't forward your transactional Facebook emails to other people.
There's also no feature to verify or disavow email addresses.
I wonder if they change this policy now that more people know about it.
I own the domain name for my last name, so that I have the email address [firstname]@[lastname].com. But when signing up for services I like to use my domain as a catchall so I can have unique email addresses for each service. Of course that means I receive all emails sent to anything at [lastname].com. Even though my last name is not that common, there’s apparently a ton of people with my last name who sign up for services using their first name @[lastname].com, even though they obviously don’t have access to that email address and haven’t for at least the 8 years that I’ve owned the domain name. I’ve never understood what compels a person to type in an email address for service if they don’t actually have access to that email. And yes, I see plenty of bank accounts and other important accounts as mentioned in the article. It’s mind-boggling. I also get plenty of personal email as well, intended for people with that first name and last name. In those cases I usually reply to tell them they have the wrong email address, and more than once someone has responded back again asking me if I could pass the message along to that person as if I’m supposed to know them.
You might want to set up a DMARC policy for your domain. Since I set mine to "p=reject" I haven't had any such issues. DMARC extends DKIM and SPF, and you (typically) need to pass at least one of those to pass DMARC.
I'm not sure if you're using "example" as a metasyntactic variable, or you're actually the owner of example.com. If it's the latter, I do use your domain for forms that require an email but I don't actually want feedback from. In my defense, your web page says "You may use this domain in literature without prior coordination or asking for permission." This isn't literature, but I didn't think I needed permission or coordination for other users either.
I was so happy when I was able to get my (exceedingly common) full name as my gmail address.
1.x decades later, I regret it. I get people's medical information, legal documentation, all of it. It is stunning to me the quantity of PII that flows into my inbox daily. Back when it was a trickle, I used to try and contact the people involved to let them know of the issue. It almost never worked out, and I got tired of getting yelled at.
At this point, I keep my account simply because if I were to close it, I don't trust whomever might have it next. It is what it is.
I share a name with a famous person and my first and last name are also my email address (@ a certain mail service) and I often get receipts for things he’s purchased as well as personal correspondence. When it’s a person I always respond and say that unfortunately I’m not the person they’re looking for just so they know.
I feel like you could simply stop using it, set up a vacation auto-responder, and log in once in a while to keep it from expiring and reverting to someone unseemly.
This whole thread is the reason I started requiring extra email verification when members signed up at our hackerspace/makerspace. A surprising number of otherwise-bright people don't know their own email address.
Honestly, I'm not far from doing exactly that. It's just frustrating to be forced from one's own name by nothing more than legions of derppelgängers, you know?
Yep, I secured a firstnamelastname.gmail (both common) for my wife early in gmail's life- and its very useful for ease in sharing.
I have a similar .mac/.me/.icloud email.
Unfortunately the innumerable 1,2,3 ended users of the same email get wearying to deal with for both of us. We both have persistent UK versions of ourselves, lots of offers for free tickets to football games in the UK that I have to regretfully pass up; as well as a variety of other people that we've managed to classify by geography.
The PII stuff is really the hard part- real estate documents, job offers, legal communications, x-rays, etc. You want to help but often it just generates a lot of heat without helping.
My email address most recently was used for some online courses at a .mil address. They took me off their list when I asked, the amount of notifications was pretty incredible. It’s been used for dental records in Oklahoma and to buy heavy machinery in Germany. It’s still obscure enough not to be a real problem, so it’s mostly amusing.
I have my not-so-common name as my gmail address and I still get a ton of crap. The most frustrating is from a power company in Ohio that sends me billing statements every month. I contacted them to ask them to stop emailing me because I'm not the intended recipient. They said they can't stop emailing me because only the account holder is allowed to change the email preferences. Apparently my only recourse is to reset the password on the account and claim it as my own... for the last few years I've just been deleting the monthly emails.
I also get fun things like family photos from people I've never met before
I have the same issue. I never waste time trying to find a way to forwards these emails to the right people, because I am extremely suspicious, so I often assume there is a phishing attempt behind these emails. I mean, often, money is mentioned in the email (like booking a hotel, a bill, a car insurance, Internet subscription, etc.). It might be legit, but it is not worth the hassle for me, and it is none of my business anyway.
...for now, yes. I just don't trust them to keep that policy, you know? Microsoft & Yahoo already recycle, and I am willing to bet that Google will eventually, too.
Readit News
She just didn't get it and more and more new accounts began showing up.
When that didn't work, I tracked down one of her relatives on Facebook, who happened to be younger so she got the whole Internet thing, and explained that her elderly grandmother (it turns out) was using an address that didn't belong to her. Her granddaughter told me she would talk to her grandma and tell her how silly she was being and promised to explain how her grandma could keep herself safe while shopping online.
No new accounts in the grandma's name have shown up since...
A woman texted me via iMessage that she was calling out sick to her job at a local public school. I replied that I hoped she felt better, but clearly had a wrong number.
She insisted that I was Joanna, an Occupational Therapist at this school. (Emma gave me this number!). Clearly I was not, and did not know Emma, or any of the other things that were going on. Then she accused me of stealing Joanna's phone number.
Turns out -- if you send an iMessage to someone in your Contacts, it does the first lookup by email, NOT by phone number. By assuming Joanna had my email address -- something lots of people seem to think is theirs -- I ended up also getting their iMessages.
I tried emailing the gent to explain, but received no reply. So I've just been forwarding those emails to the fellow's real address when they arrive. Perhaps he never checks email, hence his lack of reply to my earlier note, but I forward just in case.
On the plus side, this personal experience made me very adamant about protecting mistakenly-registered users at my employer. When we were planning to add logged in accounts to our service, the sales team (understandably!) wanted the signup process to be as frictionless as possible, and thought that new users should be able to start putting data into their account as soon as they registered. I insisted that we require email verification before allowing users to enter personal data. When I got resistance to my plan, I logged into my webmail and showed the team all the crazy email I got from people who’d mis-entered my address, and suddenly they understood. I wasn’t just inventing some bizarre, unlikely edge case: these things really happen, and often.
Edit: And as you might guess if you squint at my username, my name isn’t super common. It’s not unique on the planet, but it’s certainly not “Smith”. If I have to deal with all this, I bet the Smiths of the world find it nightmarish.
Back then, I never considered this address an "OG" address, but then around 2012 I noticed something funny. I volunteered to do some charity work and everyone was asked to sign in to a log book and write down their email address with a pen. Several people who worked for this charity said to me "How did you get that email address?" and seemed to think it was unusual that I had a Gmail address that was simply my last name. When I asked them what their email address was, they'd say something like "fluffybunny32428@hotmail.com" or something like that. Hard to believe people use those kinds of addresses for official business and applying for jobs, but they do.
My name is also very English. So when I get missent email, almost everybody using my address is from the UK, Canada, Australia, or NZ.
One of my Gmail addresses is <my first name>@gmail.com and I never get interesting titbits intended for other people.
Mind you, it probably helps that my first name and surname are pretty unusual. I've also got <my first name>@yandex.com, <my surname>@yandex.com, plus the <my first name>.net and <my surname>.net domain names. So I've pretty much cornered the market in being uniquely identifiable online, for anyone who knows me.
Hmmm... maybe I should se if <my surname>@gmail.com is available, just to really tie up the loose ends!
UPDATE: Hmmm... <my surname>@gmail.com has already been taken, so I can't complete the set. Chances are I actually set it up myself a long while back and then never bothered to use it, but I'm buggered if I can remember the password.
To get a good email address these days you either have to be very early at jumping on a new email service or you have to be skilled enough to use your own domain.
A couple of years back, a friend was doing some recruiting. One of the applicants had the email address givesdamngreathead@hotmail.com.
(Translated, it was in another language.)
On the other hand, it appears my name is unique in the world. The only things I've ever found under my name that weren't written by me appear to be people scraping for content and trashing the format--I've found plenty of examples of words attributed to me that were really quotes.
I occasionally try to remedy the issues, but I have yet to convince my mother to fix the email on her bank account.
One large financial services provider even told me that their "policy" was to allow 3, 4, or 5 characters as the last part of the domain. So .ninja is A-OK. I pointed out how ludicrous this was, and they told me it was their "policy" again, and that's why Australian Super doesn't have any of my money.
There were various ways in which that failed.
1. ".name" was pretty new by then, so some frontends did not accept it
2. some frontends objected to the third level of my domain part, accepting third levels only in such cases as the well know. ".co.uk" for example
3. some frontends let me sign up, but something in the backend failed, I can only suspect if it was the ".name" tld or my third level, but I never got any mails after signing up
I wonder what happens with .co.uk, and other two-letter second-level domains.
This has the side effect of knowing who has been selling out your email to spammers.
[0] https://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~watrous/plus-signs-in-email-addr...
Fails a lot of validations because ‘example’ can’t possible by right eh?!
I wonder what happened when I didn't show up (I did let them know that I wouldn't be there), and I wonder if it was ever finished and released.
Yes, I also get the bills (mostly from electricians in Australia for some reason) the porn/game signups, the notes from Grampa, etc.
I still get updates in my email from this family and even had bank statement updates sent to me. and birthday wishes mean for the other sstave...
I have told them multiple times - but I am still on their family tree - for a DECADE
I have Firstname.Lastname@gmail but I never get any mistaken mail there.
Now text messages on the other hand... I get all sorts, at one point I was getting some for a Black Gun group. Now I am getting them from the DNC but they are address to the wrong name.
The scarier thing is two factor authorization text messages, I remember getting some for Facebook and Instagram. I never did anything with them but if not set up right I suppose I could get into someone else's account.
I was once the (proud) owner of `ozzy@ibm.net` at some point in the mid-late nighties.
I was living in Istanbul for awhile and IBM had just entered the market to bring us all Internet, and decided to use their `ibm.net` domain to give all their customers free email.
Still miss that one xD
Really like your approach at work though, I am apparently signed up to so many various services that I have never heard of, and could probably access lots of PII if I wanted to.
I unsubscribe and/or report spam where I can, but on a typical day, I still get around 3 emails intended for someone else.
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Google's "targeted-journalist-level" Advanced Protection Program means I don't have to worry about password resets or account recovery stuff on the account.
Though I have lost track of the number of services I didn't have immediate access to since someone signed up using my email address, and reclaiming it can be a battle sometimes. The Apple ID was interesting - but luckily everyone's "first pet's name" was "Fido"... (Seriously... Please validate your emails everyone!!!)
Often, whenever a real mailing address is included I print out the email and send it in a real letter with a friendly (if just a tad passive-aggressive) note inside. But overall I try to do the right thing for important documents and correspondence.
I do shudder to think how many random accounts are just an email-password-reset away from having access though...
Thanks, I never heard of that before. https://landing.google.com/advancedprotection/
The worst was when my wife began receiving outage alerts from a Fortune 100 company's NOC. Not just simple Nagios alerts, but detailed technical information accompanying the alert. When we attempted to notify their security team they threatened us for having "hacked" their system. Turns out they realized a former employee added their personal address to the distro when they left so they could help with the transition.
Then there was the mother who signed me up to get email when her kids didn't show up at school ....
Then again I used to have a fax phone number one off from a pharmacy, other people's prescriptions every week
Its crazy.
Linkedin is criminal in this department.
I get emails from middle schools, online shopping of course, but also emails for at least a couple Trump supporters (not trying to profile; simply getting Trump campaign's constant barrage of emails demanding more money; nothing from Joe's side yet)
What I find particularly annoying is when parents use this account to register for a kid's school alerts. All sort of important stuff like "Do not send your kid to school this week!" or "Where did your kid go?" and because the school itself is also not super savvy, there is nowhere for me to send a reply saying "You need to fix this!"
I couldn't send mail from that address, but I sure did receive it. An endless torrent of weird junk, and a surprising amount of personal data, business secrets, and passwords. If I was maliciously minded I could have done a lot of damage.
I spent those months trying to find any way to get a message into Google to fix it, and only eventually succeeded when I learned a friend-of-a-friend actually worked there, and they helped un-scramble my account.
At some point both his wife has asked me what I thought about a forwarded message from their mortgage broker and his brother in-law asked me my input on buying a 30ft yacht and what to name it.
I always ignore the serious ones for obvious ethical reasons but can't help myself with the more innocent cases. I've found I quite enjoy giving non-commital responses to these emails that won't give up the gig but also don't help them either, things like: "that seems pricey" or "cool! What are you going to name her?", and "she's a beaut!".
I suspect it will go on for a while.
* Several people from (I think) Mexico City have sent me requests in Spanish asking for medical prescriptions, including photos of their current medication.
* I started receiving receipts for an Italian parking fee app. After I contacted their support about the problem, I received an email addressed to their user asking them to confirm the email address.
* Someone signed up for Comcast DSL and there was no way to opt out of those emails, support didn't react and logging into the account would have required additional information not in the emails. I finally made a complaint to the FTC under the CAN SPAM act - that got their attention and they managed to fix the issue.
* Someone signed up for some rewards program and proceeded to collect points by signing up for about 10 different newsletters.
I have answered some helpfully if I had the time, but mostly ignored them and put them in a folder as "mail for others".
One in particular, some kid in Arizona who shares my last name has signed up for everything from golf to Epic Games. I found him on facebook and friended (since we shared our last name) and politely asked him if he could try to not use my email for things. He told me it was his, called me a creep and blocked me.
It's kind of hilarious how many people insist the email I (or Google I suppose) own is also theirs, despite the technical impossibility of that scenario. The same has happened with my phone number.
There's also no feature to verify or disavow email addresses.
I wonder if they change this policy now that more people know about it.
It really is mind boggling.
The tld is a little rarer but plenty of people still use it as garbage input to web forms!
1.x decades later, I regret it. I get people's medical information, legal documentation, all of it. It is stunning to me the quantity of PII that flows into my inbox daily. Back when it was a trickle, I used to try and contact the people involved to let them know of the issue. It almost never worked out, and I got tired of getting yelled at.
At this point, I keep my account simply because if I were to close it, I don't trust whomever might have it next. It is what it is.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/rupert-goodwins-diary-30391728...
This whole thread is the reason I started requiring extra email verification when members signed up at our hackerspace/makerspace. A surprising number of otherwise-bright people don't know their own email address.
I have a similar .mac/.me/.icloud email.
Unfortunately the innumerable 1,2,3 ended users of the same email get wearying to deal with for both of us. We both have persistent UK versions of ourselves, lots of offers for free tickets to football games in the UK that I have to regretfully pass up; as well as a variety of other people that we've managed to classify by geography.
The PII stuff is really the hard part- real estate documents, job offers, legal communications, x-rays, etc. You want to help but often it just generates a lot of heat without helping.
I also get fun things like family photos from people I've never met before