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The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

krebsonsecurity.com

131–140 of 285 posts

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

#132

I 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 used to use a catchall but every few months spammers will use my domain in their spam from line and I would get thousands of bounces.

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

#133
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Turns out folks mostly validate .com in my experience, which I assume is because of good old mail.com. I wonder what happens with .co.uk, and other two-letter second-level domains.

Probably hard coded exceptions.

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

#134
post #117

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…

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.

I gave up using mail@.network because of the significant percentage of sites that refuse the .network TLD.

One large financial services provider even told me that their "policy" was to allow 3, 4, or 5 characters as the last part of the domain. So .ninja is A-OK. I pointed out how ludicrous this was, and they told me it was their "policy" again, and that's why Australian Super doesn't have any of my money.

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

#135

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?

GP wanted the service, so they would probably confirm it themselves.

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

#136
post #117

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…

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.

I have something similar when I used contact@..name

There were various ways in which that failed.

1. ".name" was pretty new by then, so some frontends did not accept it

2. some frontends objected to the third level of my domain part, accepting third levels only in such cases as the well know. ".co.uk" for example

3. some frontends let me sign up, but something in the backend failed, I can only suspect if it was the ".name" tld or my third level, but I never got any mails after signing up

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

#137
post #102

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…

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 too have lastname @ gmail, and I find that many people with the same surname as me, and who have firstname.lastname @gmail don't know the difference between a period and a space in an email address.

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

#138
post #130
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I considered that, but then I checked and saw that almost all of them are coming from other domains, and often non-webmail domains. Of course, whatever email management software or app they're using on their end could be doing that, too.

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

#139
post #102

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…

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…

Same here. Unfortunately my distant cousins of more advanced age, and my mother, and even my brothers (all of whom have emails only one character off from my own) sometimes mistype. I suspect some groups incorrectly transcribe signups from paper forms as well.

I occasionally try to remedy the issues, but I have yet to convince my mother to fix the email on her bank account.

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

#140
I can relate to that. I own a @outlook.de mail address - It has been signed up for Piola, Snapchat, Instagram, UMG Gaming and Dropbox. I also received some german correspondence, which should have gone somewhere else, but ended up in my account.

On another note - I've got several .@.tld mail addresses, and also a domain. They get mixed up quite often:

There is someone with almost the same name as mine, except that my last letter is "t", and his is "g". Because these keys are so close to each other on a keyboard, I receive a lot of stuff which was meant for him. I always forward it.

Then there is someone with the exact same name in my country, who has -@.de, whereas I have .@.de

Needless to say I got to know a lot about him in the last 10 years.

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