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The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

krebsonsecurity.com

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

#91

Post by marban »

probably_wrong wrote: post #89
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.

I was speaking of two separate cases — Spam + legit mails; but no matter which, the sheer amount of mails make it unusable.

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

#92

Post by 1of1 »

I was recently in an Xbox party with 3 char anime/Japanese theme tags. I asked them why there weren't any numbers after their tags and they went on for two hours teaching me about OG tags and that his $750 tag was a steal as it wasn't just random letters, but an actual word. The other guy paid $1,500 and at one time paid $12,000! They explained you can buy them on IG or a site called ogusers, but that you should always use an intermediary who holds the account and your bitcoin, and acts as a security check middle man for a small fee.

They also told me about an MS website hack, where you could enter spaces into your name by changing the client-side javascript and entering about 500 spaces between each character and then filling the field with spaces until maxchar.

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

#93

Post by kstrauser »

arsome wrote: post #52
gwbas1c wrote: post #51

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.

Yikes, that seems like it could slip into a patient privacy violation of some sort pretty easily. What did the doctor say?

Not really. If the patient asked the doctor to be contacted at that address, the doctor’s not on the hook for obeying their wishes.

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

#94

Post by mesh »

causality0 wrote: post #88
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.

Yeah, I have the same type of email, and I received legal and medical documents, letters from schools about students, tons of personal notes, and daily signups for services.

Its crazy.

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

#95

Post by skeoh »

Something1234 wrote: post #71
MH15 wrote: 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.

Anecdotally: I have a 2 character GitHub user (https://github.com/j-) and I like to think I do more than name squat. I missed out on the 1 character user (https://github.com/j) by only a matter of weeks!

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

#96

Post by wyxuan »

ummwhat wrote: post #24

I don't know where else to tell this story, but I got the most amazing piece of spam the other day. According to the sender, an unnamed person had told them to contact me. They allege that over the past 50 years the CIA has been investigating life itself and the sender wanted me to see some bombshell revelation that world governments and large corporations had known about for the last 17 years. I was given a shortene…

Garden variety, I’ve seen worse

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

#97

Post by hoseja »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #68
HenryKissinger wrote: post #60

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.

Maybe he means "comprehensive frameworks". The kind that do everything. The kind you probably shouldn't mix together.

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

#98

Post by skeoh »

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…

I've got [first initial][last initial]@[my email provider] and have come to find much of the mail I receive seems to be addressed to people with the same initials as myself. It's incredibly frustrating to find the same culprits over and over again. Do they not know their own email address? Or do they just not care? (I suspect the latter)

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

#99

Post by alibarber »

kstrauser wrote: post #87

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 use…

Hah - not as bad but similar, but hey it’s my name-ish. I get a fairly high amount of password reset attempts on it too. (guess my Gmail address, I got gmail back when it was invite only beta)

Really like your approach at work though, I am apparently signed up to so many various services that I have never heard of, and could probably access lots of PII if I wanted to.

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

#100

Post by CamperBob2 »

ObsoleteNerd wrote: post #27

Yeah I've got a 6 digit semi-common name Gmail account (from the invite-only days) and the amount of junk I get to it is mind blowing. Not "spam", that gets filtered pretty well by Google these days, but emails specifically sent to me but not for "me" personally like TFA talks about. 100+ emails a week in my primary inbox that are from people signing up to random stuff in my name, basically any/every service you can…

Same here. My GF at the time received a couple of the earliest GMail invites from someone she worked with, and I remember thinking, "Wow, this'll be great, nobody will ever forget my email address."

15 years later: https://i.imgur.com/FlCi3xT.png

Almost none of that is actually spam. Mostly list/membership subscriptions, reminders that my $(VEHICLE) is due for service at $(DEALERSHIP), and misdirected personal emails ranging from amusing to upsetting.

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