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The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

krebsonsecurity.com

191–200 of 285 posts

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

#191

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…

Since we're all reminiscing...

I was once the (proud) owner of `ozzy@ibm.net` at some point in the mid-late nighties.

I was living in Istanbul for awhile and IBM had just entered the market to bring us all Internet, and decided to use their `ibm.net` domain to give all their customers free email.

Still miss that one xD

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

#192
post #184

A friend of mine made https://guide.mlz.me/ "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Correctly Validating Customer's Email Addresses". He doesn't send it to everyone who typos an email address, but for businesses - especially ones that send him financial data unsolicited - the level of snark is appropriate.

This guide advocates for some pretty silly best practices.

It’s very hung up on making sure the user types the right email address on account registration, having them type it twice, making them provide some sort of security question (before their account is created, mind you!), making sure the question is answered correctly by the person clicking the link, etc etc.

None of that is necessary. Your signup form can literally be a single email field. You validate that it looks enough like an email, and send a unique link to it to continue signup. Then you ask whoever clicked that link questions like “please create a password”, “select a username”, whatever personal information you require.

What happens if they type the wrong email? Well, you send a signup link to the wrong person. Big whoop. Worst case, someone else will get a link to create an account on your system. (Not to create the original person’s account! Because you didn’t ask for anything but an email yet! They would be creating an account, with their own email, even.)

The email validation link only tells you that the person who followed the link owns the email address that was typed. Just don’t do anything permanent (like actually creating an account) until the link is followed, and you don’t need to worry about whether the email was correct.

Now, this still has issues where people can type all sorts of emails into the signup form without friction to make your service spam them with signup links, but I’d argue that the advice in the article has the same problem, just with a trivial amount of additional steps (like having to type the email twice and set up some security question.)

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

#193
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 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.

There's probably a "misconceptions people have about e-mail addresses" post out there somewhere; the tl;dr is that so much is or will be allowed, for validation you should really only check if there's an @ in the address, for the rest just try to send an email and see if it bounces.

But don't activate an account without e-mail verification. I got a random account on Deezer because someone signed up with my e-mail address; they probably got it off a spam list. But it kind of implies that Deezer didn't do e-mail verification before letting people use their platform.

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

#194
post #155
post #150

Oh god yes. I have a 6 character pronouncable gmail address as my main email address. Some highlights: * Several people from (I think) Mexico City have sent me requests in Spanish asking for medical prescriptions, including photos of their current medication. * I started receiving receipts for an Italian parking fee app. After I contacted their support about the problem, I received an email addressed to their user as…

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…

Fun fact: Facebook logs people in if they click on a link in their transactional emails. Don't forward your transactional Facebook emails to other people.

There's also no feature to verify or disavow email addresses.

I wonder if they change this policy now that more people know about it.

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

#195

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…

[deleted]

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

#196

I was so happy when I was able to get my (exceedingly common) full name as my gmail address. 1.x decades later, I regret it. I get people's medical information, legal documentation, all of it. It is stunning to me the quantity of PII that flows into my inbox daily. Back when it was a trickle, I used to try and contact the people involved to let them know of the issue. It almost never worked out, and I got tired of ge…

I share a name with a famous person and my first and last name are also my email address (@ a certain mail service) and I often get receipts for things he’s purchased as well as personal correspondence. When it’s a person I always respond and say that unfortunately I’m not the person they’re looking for just so they know.

Ah my friend Rupert Goodwins got a lot of email via gmail for Rupert Grint and he wrote about it here back in 2004.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/rupert-goodwins-diary-30391728...

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

#197

I am really glad that I do not have one of these email accounts. While I cannot speak firsthand of some of the shenanigans that are mentioned in the article, I have worked in the web hosting industry for 20 years. I have seen some of the horrible security practices in use by customers and, surprisingly, people in the industry. I've seen many people locked out of their hosting accounts because they have their primary…

> I've seen many people locked out of their hosting accounts because they have their primary account email address as one of the hosted email addresses on their accounts, and suddenly they've lost access to their web hosting control panel because their domain expired or their email was otherwise taken offline. This is a surprisingly difficult risk to effectively mitigate. If you have a domain and tie your domain regi…

> If you tie your registration and hosting accounts to a third-party email account, you could get locked out if the third-party decides to nuke your account for any arbitrary reason (cough, cough, Gmail).

This is interesting. I usually point all my WHOIS info to @, but 's WHOIS goes to one of my personal Gmail accounts.

I'm going to switch it to a domain where I control the DNS, so I can change the MX record if a provider decides to nuke my account.

Now I'm wondering how this works with any registrar's domain privacy feature — technically, they're the "owner" of the domain in the WHOIS record.

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

#199
post #106

My email address is nothing too original (in the profile if you want to check) but it contains a dot. As you might know, gmail ignores dots in the addresses so nico.aragon and nicoaragon are basically the same. Well it seems that Paypal decided recently that why bother confirming email addresses. Just let anyone use any email address. They send a confirmation email, yes. But then accept the address no matter if they…

> Well it seems that Paypal decided recently that why bother confirming email addresses. Just let anyone use any email address. They send a confirmation email, yes. But then accept the address no matter if they receive the answer or not.

Hah, I don't remember receiving a confirmation email. Unfortunately, there's no way to disavow an email address from someone's account either, which means I can't use that particular email for PayPal.

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

#200
Apart from the joys of having an OG email address of my first and last name, which is neither a very common or uncommon name, I have also created handles, for the sake of privacy, using slight variations of my name. It has always been easy, with a slight creative twist, to be able to create quite short and plain english versions without all the extra numbers and letters.

I also had in the early days of facebook the username 'qetuo' which was very convenient. Though has since been picked up years later by some chancer, after my having deleted my initial account. Though I did introduce the idea to some friends, who then created usernames such as 'tyghv' or 'rtfgv' which are sort of OG qwerty convenient usernames.

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