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The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

krebsonsecurity.com

71–80 of 285 posts

Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

#71
post #59

My 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.

The question is if any of those short accounts actually have anything interesting as contributions or just name squatting.

Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

#72
post #59

My 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.

I managed to snag a 3-letter one, so far it’s only really useful for manually adding origins...

Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

#73
post #7

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…

Yeah me too, facebook is the worst!

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

Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all the “smart” people at Google, their incompetence is astounding.

Don't they have like three different internal Javascript libraries or something?

I would personally be worried if they only had one.

Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

#75
post #28
post #7

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…

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 acc…

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).

Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't they have like three different internal Javascript libraries or something?

Am a Googler who doesn't write Javascript, opinions are my own etc etc... I don't know how many there are, but are you saying that 3 would be a lot? There's probably hundreds of internal libraries for other languages like Java, C++, Go, etc. 3 really doesn't seem excessive.

They must be real big libraries

Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

#78
post #31

So I own a domain that is very similar to a ballet company for children in Florida and once, a mid-sized CEO emailed me PDF images with credit card details! I tried reaching out, but my email was probably ignored because they thought it was a scam. I'm sure that sending that info insecurely at least... violates mastercard agreements? I dunno. I just hope people checked and double-checked what emails they send.

I own a domain name that is a generic word but is also an one-off of a medical company (and a very "likely" typo).

My catch-all mailbox has received an insane amount of highly sensitive medical records over the years. Most of these mails were coming from employees of the company itself, not external correspondents.

I have since modified the catch-all mailbox to reject mails from the medical company, so they get a bounce message. This has not reduced the number of messages, but at least they will know something went wrong...

People are not very careful, even with highly sensitive data...

Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

#79
post #59

My 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.

> Of course I got rate limited in this, as you can probably imagine given the factorial complexity of checking every name.

I suspect it's only exponential. Or does more of unicode open up as you increase the length?

Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

#80

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 ge…

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 rese…

You can threaten to report them to regulators for knowingly sending non-public personal information to a third-party.
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