I have (my legal name)@gmail.com and I occasionally get mail for people with the same name.
Usually I just send a polite response or flag it as spam; but the time I got a Covid-19 test order I called the doctor.
The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
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Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#52I have (my legal name)@gmail.com and I occasionally get mail for people with the same name. Usually I just send a polite response or flag it as spam; but the time I got a Covid-19 test order I called the doctor.
Yikes, that seems like it could slip into a patient privacy violation of some sort pretty easily. What did the doctor say?
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#53Due 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…
For all the “smart” people at Google, their incompetence is astounding.
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#54From early invite days, I have a super OG gmail account (so OG that it is often mistaken for a system account), and I get a lot of random resumes, driver licences mostly from people all over Asia, job applications, some people decide to use it for Uber, gaming, and of course a few individuals used it to sign up for their banking services.
I did exploit this exactly once, someone signed me up for Spotify (free tier) which wasn't available in my area then.
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#55I have more or less followed the lives of several other people with my same name through years of misaddressed email. Most of the time I simply ignore it, occasionally I will respond, it is not much of a burden.
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#56I 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 j…
If my guess that you’re referring to Yahoo Mail is correct, I’ve seen the same problem but with spam. With all the hacks and data leaks that happened over the years, one of my mailboxes there receives a lot (like a whole lot) of spam. Yahoo’s spam filters have also seemed terrible for not detecting spam and not learning from mail market as spam by me. I have similar anecdotes from a few other people I know.
On this topic, I do get some mails intended for others, including bank statements with passwords that are trivial to crack, account signups for social media platforms, delivery services, etc. I’ve also seen that there’s no way to rectify this in many cases — the entity sending the email (or the appropriate group within the company) isn’t available to contact and resolve the situation. In other cases they just don’t care even after they receive the emails about the information leaks form their systems.
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#57I have [firstlast]@gmail.com. I definitely don't get the amount of crap that I would if I had only one of those names alone, but I still wish I had picked something else.
Definitely not worth telling people that they messed up because chances are they don't care, won't know what to do, or will get angry. The only time I'll correct someone is if the email was entered incorrectly by a sender.
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#58Tangent to what I’m seeing in the comments. I have a Google Voice number. When I signed up they let me choose an available number of my choice. So I found one with lots of repeating numbers to make it easy to remember.
Turns out it’s the same number as a major medical insurance support number. Just a different area code. I get calls in waves, it seems. This week I get 3 or 4 a day. I ignore them. Occasionally I get voicemail “I have a question about a patient” or whatever.
If I answer and try to explain it, it confuses people and they usually get frustrated. Not worth my time anymore. Basically I ignore all calls that aren’t from people I have saved.
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#59My GitHub is four letters which is quite convenient. Recently a friend and I ran a script on the GitHub API to find the shortest available names and found that there are no three letter names and very few four letter names remaining.
Of course I got rate limited in this, as you can probably imagine given the factorial complexity of checking every name.
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#60Due 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…
For all the “smart” people at Google, their incompetence is astounding.
Don't they have like three different internal Javascript libraries or something?