The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by stennie » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 12:51 PM UTC

When I joined Yahoo! Australia & NZ in 1997 I had the OG account @yahoo.com.au. We later launched Yahoo! Australia & NZ Mail and moved the company accounts to a yahoo-inc subdomain, so the natural thing to do was redirect our former yahoo.com.au email addresses to the equivalent corp inbox. The OG address was on my business cards, and it was nice having some continuity. Briefly.

I never realised how many friends I had on the internet, and at first I gently replied to a few that I wasn't the `` they were looking for. This was a more utopian era where email spam was in a more infant stage, and most of these friends were real people trying to connect rather than bots and scammers. However, there were a lot of new users joining Y!Mail and apparently quite a few were looking for me.

Some of my new friends were pretty insistent (and oversharing), so it didn't take long for me to abandon the OG forwarding address and associated nostalgia. So many friends, so little time for real conversation.

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

#222

Post by chrisweekly » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 12:53 PM UTC

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…

yep, I'm "cweekly" at most places and get a lot of this; there's rarely any recourse even if I had the time to try and resolve em

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

#223

Post by plorg » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 12:53 PM UTC

I have an old Hotmail address that I signed up for while taking high school Spanish. It consists of the Spanish equivalent of my first and middle names and my HS graduation year. I haven't used it as my main email in years, but it still is connected to my Gmail. For a long time I was getting account messages for iTunes and Xbox Live. Eventually that petered out.

I'd forgotten about this until last week I started receiving messages from a cluster of contacts as if I were the member of an online continuing education course. None of the addresses had the domain of an educational institution, but the content mostly tracked. I managed to communicate to the group that they had the wrong after, but it took a few repetitions, because they were not all members of the same thread.

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

#224

Post by Sebb767 » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 12:55 PM UTC

isolli wrote: post #198

It reminds me of how the owner of the @N account on Twitter had it stolen from him [0] [0] https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-username-...

> A coworker of mine was able to connect me to a GoDaddy executive. The executive attempted to get the security team involved, but nothing has happened.

That part was really shocking. I can see why you might be stuck with a low-level support tech that can't and won't help you, but not being helped despite having this level of attention is horrible.

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

#225

Post by 52-6F-62 » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 12:58 PM UTC

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 have two such gmail accounts! I got one early on—around 2005 or 2006 which receives a gross ton of spam, so eventually replaced it with one that uses my initials and then my last name which is way less trouble. I got my brother on board around the same time. He just uses our last name at gmail. I'm sure he gets his share of crap.

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

#226

Post by cjcole » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 1:05 PM UTC

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…

I was once directed to appear at a Las Vegas hotel lobby at 7 AM sharp. I was to drive various poker celebrities from shoot to shoot around the city for a movie. Included was a detailed itinerary. I recognized the names from various TV poker shows.

I wonder what happened when I didn't show up (I did let them know that I wouldn't be there), and I wonder if it was ever finished and released.

Yes, I also get the bills (mostly from electricians in Australia for some reason) the porn/game signups, the notes from Grampa, etc.

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

#227

Post by techslave » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 1:19 PM UTC

i owned root@pobox.com for many years before they realized they shouldn’t have allowed that to be registered. that was fun.

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

#228

Post by gwbas1c » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 1:22 PM UTC

kstrauser wrote: post #93

arsome wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It came from the doctor's phone. I suspect there was a miscommunication somewhere.

I've only done "polite" replies if there's clear innocence. One was to a teenager trying to guess email addresses for people involved in a college program they wanted to attend. Another was a Canadian regional employment authority trying to collect back wages from a deadbeat employer.

But someone uses my email address at a repair shop, salon, ect? Ignore. Someone puts my email address into a group discussion? Spam.

I also own my own domain. (legal name)@gmail.com sat idle for years until I found that it's easier to say "(legal name)@gmail.com" instead of ??????@(legal name).com Then I switched.

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

#229

Post by themaninthedark » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 1:26 PM UTC

samstave wrote: post #113

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…

Over a decade ago, I was added to a Sri Lanken family tree thing on Ancestry - because they invited my email address, as we have the same last name (my last name though is Norwegian, and the same as this sri lanken family. I still get updates in my email from this family and even had bank statement updates sent to me. and birthday wishes mean for the other sstave... I have told them multiple times - but I am still on…

Of course they won't let you go, your family now!

I have Firstname.Lastname@gmail but I never get any mistaken mail there.

Now text messages on the other hand... I get all sorts, at one point I was getting some for a Black Gun group. Now I am getting them from the DNC but they are address to the wrong name.

The scarier thing is two factor authorization text messages, I remember getting some for Facebook and Instagram. I never did anything with them but if not set up right I suppose I could get into someone else's account.

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

#230

Post by techslave » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 1:27 PM UTC

Baeocystin wrote: post #13

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…

gmail burns addresses forever. no one else will get it if you close it.