I wonder if the owner of example@example.com experience the same.
No one owns example.com; it's reserved as an example domain.
The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
121–130 of 285 posts
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#122What if you simply changed all your accounts to use a + variant (e.g. johnsmith+official@gmail.com) and filter out everything sent to you without a + in the address?
I’ve learned that there are a lot of places that auto remove the +official (or whatever you have after the + sign). I assume there is a common email library out there that auto strips this information.
Perhaps adding dots then? They shouldn't normally be stripped, but are also ignored by gmail. john.smith would obviously still get a ton of spam, but something like j.ohn.smith might not. (If we were literally talking about the name John Smith I expect it still would, but for other names that should work...)
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#123Weird, I think I have an OG account (on Gmail), but I generally don't get too much spam.
I have my username @ gmail which is kinda OG as it has no numbers etc., and I got in early via an invite to secure it. I get fair amount of spam on it, but as I don't use it as my main email, I'm not that bothered.
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#124Ugh, 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…
My main email address is @gmail.com. My surname is not a very common one, yet I still experience many of the side effects described here. I've had this account since the first day Gmail was available to the public, April 1st 2004—I was invited by a friend who worked for Google at the time. Back then, I never considered this address an "OG" address, but then around 2012 I noticed something funny. I volunteered to do s…
I have a firstname.lastname Gmail account. Neither frst or last are particularly common. There are various people around the planet who hand out my address as there own, I get invoices on a regular basis but also correspondence from real estate agents and legal correspondence. Most recently I spam listed a Canadian telco because some gentleman in Canada is joyfully handing out my address. On the other hand I very rarely get someone else's snail mail and if I do it is for a neighbour I know a house or two away and never someone in another country :-)
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
My main email address is @gmail.com. My surname is not a very common one, yet I still experience many of the side effects described here. I've had this account since the first day Gmail was available to the public, April 1st 2004—I was invited by a friend who worked for Google at the time. Back then, I never considered this address an "OG" address, but then around 2012 I noticed something funny. I volunteered to do s…
I have a firstname.lastname Gmail account. Neither frst or last are particularly common. There are various people around the planet who hand out my address as there own, I get invoices on a regular basis but also correspondence from real estate agents and legal correspondence. Most recently I spam listed a Canadian telco because some gentleman in Canada is joyfully handing out my address. On the other hand I very rar…
I get loads of invoices, too, from all over the Commonwealth. The more I think about it, the more I suspect the author is right: there are a lot of people out there who think you can just type someone's last name into webmail and it's just going to magically go to the person they intended.
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#126Its pretty ridiculous that web services still allow you to sign up without verifying your email.
iTunes, LastPass, Dashlane, Yahoo, Microsoft other Gmail accounts definitely require verification.
Perhaps the author collected those accounts 12 years ago when it hasn't been the case? Or does he click on the verification links?
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#127Ugh, 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…
Yup, I feel your pain. One of my emails is @ .com. This fails verification on so many websites it's just comical. I then figured on making a @ .com. Turns out folks mostly validate .com in my experience, which I assume is because of good old mail.com. It's frustrating.
My email address is *@example.tld
Fails a lot of validations because ‘example’ can’t possible by right eh?!
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#128I have an "OG" ICQ account, some bloke in russia offered to buy it.
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#129I own the domain name for my last name, so that I have the email address [firstname]@[lastname].com. But when signing up for services I like to use my domain as a catchall so I can have unique email addresses for each service. Of course that means I receive all emails sent to anything at [lastname].com. Even though my last name is not that common, there’s apparently a ton of people with my last name who sign up for s…
I’m the same except instead of [lastname] it’s ‘example’.
The tld is a little rarer but plenty of people still use it as garbage input to web forms!
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a firstname.lastname Gmail account. Neither frst or last are particularly common. There are various people around the planet who hand out my address as there own, I get invoices on a regular basis but also correspondence from real estate agents and legal correspondence. Most recently I spam listed a Canadian telco because some gentleman in Canada is joyfully handing out my address. On the other hand I very rar…
I get loads of invoices, too, from all over the Commonwealth. The more I think about it, the more I suspect the author is right: there are a lot of people out there who think you can just type someone's last name into webmail and it's just going to magically go to the person they intended.
Well that is how Gmail works if it finds a contact in your address book... type the name and it autocompletes. You could be on the receiving end of autocomplete failures that go unnoticed by the sender.