The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
krebsonsecurity.com
The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
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Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#2I feel sorry for the guy who registered foo@bar.com
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#3I am really glad that I do not have one of these email accounts. While I cannot speak firsthand of some of the shenanigans that are mentioned in the article, I have worked in the web hosting industry for 20 years. I have seen some of the horrible security practices in use by customers and, surprisingly, people in the industry.
I've seen many people locked out of their hosting accounts because they have their primary account email address as one of the hosted email addresses on their accounts, and suddenly they've lost access to their web hosting control panel because their domain expired or their email was otherwise taken offline.
I think what all of this boils down to is that people don't receive any actual training about how these things work. They pick up a phone and start using it and figure it out along the way, or they buy a computer and set it up the way Microsoft says and never think twice about anything else. The amount of training that people receive is dismal at best and most the time it's not even that.
There's also a contingent of the public that doesn't want any training and their main argument is "well this is how I've always done it!"
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#4I don’t have an “OG” account but a common first, last and middle initial and I get about 1-2 new signups for stuff every week.
It’s amazing how many services will not confirm email addresses and just send sensitive info (and make it hard to unsub).
Many years ago I had a CEO who made us keep one of those “retype your password to confirm” that I thought was stupid, but we did it. I think of how right he was every time some Uber driver signs up with my email.
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#5Due 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.
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#6I've got one of these. I've been invited to golf tournaments, received medical records, been included in family reunions for many years running. I've had power bills sent my way. I've seen tons of SS#'s and bank account routing numbers. Countless password reset attempts. A long time ago I decided I'd never interact, reply or respond to any mail I received apart from opening.
Tangentially related -- catch-all email accounts also get a ton of mail when the domain name they're tied to is close to something that many people send messages to. If you own a domain one keystroke away from a high volume domain - you'll get access to all sorts of things you shouldn't be seeing.
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#7I 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.
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#8For three years in a row I received an amazon gift card on father's day. Always intended for as far as I can tell the same person who has the same first initial and last name as me.
I contacted Amazon about it the first time and they wouldn't cancel it or issue a refund because I was the recipient, not the purchaser. I worry that someone has been written out of their Dad's will because he thinks they have forgotten father's day 3 years running.
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#9Its pretty ridiculous that web services still allow you to sign up without verifying your email.
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#10I still own 'sys' and 'wheel' at one of the big ISPs in the US. I used to get a lot of syslog-type messages back in the day.