Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

krebsonsecurity.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 285 posts

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

#81

Post by cyansmoker »

jameslk wrote: 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…

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!"

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

#82

Post by cva »

ggop wrote: post #11

Didn't realise this was a common problem. My gmail address has about 9 filters with ~100 terms each. Would be nice if Google automatically had an allow list with countries where I will accept account recoveries requests from. Worst though is that PayPal created an account for another person with my email address. Apparently they don't send out the initial prove-your-ownership email. Still unresolved because PayPal re…

Oh man, I have the exact same problem with PayPal allowing another person to create an account with my email address!

I've been talking to their support people on-and-off for months now and they seem utterly incapable of resolving an issue like this.

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

#83

Post by snissn »

there used to be a "hack" where you'd look up profiles on AIM (Aol instant messanger) by email address and just type things like asdfhl@hotmail.com and if it were to come up with results, sometimes multiple, you'd check to see if you could register that address at hotmail and then take over the account.

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

#84

Post by quickthrower2 »

kofejnik wrote: post #54

From 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) w…

How does someone else sign you up if they need to click the confirmation link?

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

#86

Post by bonzini »

stordoff wrote: post #75
kbaker wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I have name.wifename@gmail.com and I have not gotten many subscriptions but I got quite a few random emails meant for other people.

I did get a subscription for a Diners credit card, and I am torn about contacting the guy; I don't look at the emails but I probably could find the owner relatively easily. I contacted Diners and they didn't believe me. (Who the heck is using Diners these days?)

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

#87

Post by kstrauser »

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.

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

#88

Post by causality0 »

jameslk wrote: 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…

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.

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

#89

Post by probably_wrong »

marban wrote: post #77

I own my firstname @icloud/me.com — Stopped using it after getting up to a thousand more or less legit emails, incl. bank receipts, phone bills, etc. a day. The fact that Apple sucks with spam filtering doesn't come handy either.

While I don't have an opinion on the quality of Apple's spam filtering, your case seems particularly interesting (and hard!) because it is not spam - it is send by legitimate people with legitimate intentions.

I mean, sure, it is spam to you, but I doubt you could train a decent spam filter for this situation. Maybe a whitelist, but that's about it.

Post reply on HN