I have a 3 letter Twitter username (@kob) and the amount of spam I get is rather ridiculous. I've thought about changing it a few times but not yet.
The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
41–50 of 285 posts
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#42Story 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 a…
I bet you if you replied, "we need to talk..." it might stop. That might be too mean though, or at least give the man a warning to stop or else.
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#43I 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…
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.
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#44Weird, I think I have an OG account (on Gmail), but I generally don't get too much spam.
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> I get daily emails from these services still even with unsubscribes and blocks. They're insessant. Linkedin is criminal in this department.
One time where “criminal” may actually not be an exaggeration.
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#46Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#47For 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 f…
Doesn't amazon have a "thankyou" feature to email the sender?
It didn't at the time iirc. It was a few years back though.
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#48I 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 ge…
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.
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#49I 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 ge…
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.
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#50I have firstname@{major email service that isn't google} and, even though my name's a relatively uncommon variant spelling, the account is still pretty much completely unusable because of all the misdirected email and spam it receives-- I can't use the account even as a throwaway "sign up for crap" email address, much less for personal correspondence, because any mail directed at me would be buried in all the other junk it receives.
Just signed into it for the first time in a while, and it looks like it's gotten some better than it was-- now it's mostly mailing list stuff and actual spam (of the "your paypal account is locked" variety); seems that most legitimate services are doing better about email verification these days. At one point a few years back, someone had managed to actually create working Apple ID, Facebook, and Paypal accounts against it without access to the email (was still receiving "verify your email"-type messages at the same time as transactional emails indicating real activity).