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

161–170 of 285 posts

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

#161

Post by croon »

mywacaday wrote: post #159
croon wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have my 6 letter surname at gmail as well, and I've had this issue for decades. Everything from wedding invitations to banking to schools etc. I have answered some helpfully if I had the time, but mostly ignored them and put them in a folder as "mail for others". One in particular, some kid in Arizona who shares my last name has signed up for everything from golf to Epic Games. I found him on facebook and friended…

Please tell me you shut down a few of his "accounts"

Yes, specifically the Epic account, but I might've hijacked his Instagram from before they used email verification (just assuming they do now).

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

#162

Post by Normille »

chillfox wrote: post #118
wyclif wrote: post #102

Earlier 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…

Most people with average computer literacy has no choice but to use the fluffybunny32428 style email addresses. To get a good email address these days you either have to be very early at jumping on a new email service or you have to be skilled enough to use your own domain.

Most 'FluffyBunny...' style addresses and usernames I see tend to end in a 2 digit number which is obviously the user's birth year, which they added when told that plain old 'FluffyBunny' wasn't available.

Not a very sensible idea, given how many sites have "What year where you born?" as one of their security questions.

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

#163

Post by nicoburns »

taejo wrote: post #142
shocks wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I'm not sure if you're using "example" as a metasyntactic variable, or you're actually the owner of example.com. If it's the latter, I do use your domain for forms that require an email but I don't actually want feedback from. In my defense, your web page says "You may use this domain in literature without prior coordination or asking for permission." This isn't literature, but I didn't think I needed permission or c…

They own "example.". Which is basically asking for trouble given that "example.com" is explicitly set aside for this kind of demo/throwaway purpose.

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

#164

Post by Normille »

wyclif wrote: post #102
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…

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 feel left out!

One of my Gmail addresses is @gmail.com and I never get interesting titbits intended for other people.

Mind you, it probably helps that my first name and surname are pretty unusual. I've also got @yandex.com, @yandex.com, plus the .net and .net domain names. So I've pretty much cornered the market in being uniquely identifiable online, for anyone who knows me.

Hmmm... maybe I should se if @gmail.com is available, just to really tie up the loose ends!

UPDATE: Hmmm... @gmail.com has already been taken, so I can't complete the set. Chances are I actually set it up myself a long while back and then never bothered to use it, but I'm buggered if I can remember the password.

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

#165

Post by lorenzhs »

omnibrain wrote: post #136
cik wrote: 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.

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…

The number of sites that send mail to "foo@bar.com" when you give them "foo@sub.bar.com" is staggering, too. It's a mystery to me why they would ever want to do that, but it happens a lot.

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

#166

Post by brazzy »

croon wrote: post #161
mywacaday wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please tell me you shut down a few of his "accounts"

Yes, specifically the Epic account, but I might've hijacked his Instagram from before they used email verification (just assuming they do now).

Yes, Instagram definitely uses verification now and doesn't let you use the account until the verification is completed.

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

#167

Post by lorenzhs »

gscott wrote: post #132
OkGoDoIt wrote: post #114

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.

You might want to set up a DMARC policy for your domain. Since I set mine to "p=reject" I haven't had any such issues. DMARC extends DKIM and SPF, and you (typically) need to pass at least one of those to pass DMARC.

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

#168

Post by AdmiralGinge »

lostlogin wrote: post #39
VonGuard wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OMG some guy has signed me up for EVERYTHING from Home Depot to every dating site, to porn sites to cheating sites. It's absurd. I get daily emails from these services still even with unsubscribes and blocks. They're insessant.

> I get daily emails from these services still even with unsubscribes and blocks. They're insessant. Linkedin is criminal in this department.

I had to set up a filter to automatically reject anything from any of their domains, they're an absolute plague that Moses would be proud of.

I don't really like email alerts for social media as a concept anyway, if I want to hear what LinkedIn has to say I'll look at LinkedIn itself, it has no business injecting itself into the rest of my life via out-of-band methods like email.

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

#169

Post by Spare_account »

Normille wrote: post #162
chillfox wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people with average computer literacy has no choice but to use the fluffybunny32428 style email addresses. To get a good email address these days you either have to be very early at jumping on a new email service or you have to be skilled enough to use your own domain.

Most 'FluffyBunny...' style addresses and usernames I see tend to end in a 2 digit number which is obviously the user's birth year, which they added when told that plain old 'FluffyBunny' wasn't available. Not a very sensible idea, given how many sites have "What year where you born?" as one of their security questions.

>"What year where you born?"

Anecdata from me: I've never seen this as a security question,

I'm willing to concede that I didn't notice it because I just pick a security question at random and record it in my password database with a made up answer so that I can satisfy their test later on without using a real, guessable answer.

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

#170

Post by tomatocracy »

I have firstname.lastname@gmail.com. My name is not very common but not totally uncommon and I've had very similar experiences to the article and others here.

The most surprising thing I had was someone who signed up to an Amazon account using the address (my own amazon account has always used a different email address). Whoever did that literally gave a complete stranger access to their credit card. (I contacted Amazon and got them to remove my email from the account).

Post reply on HN