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

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

#261

Post by jaredwiener » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 4:22 PM UTC

gregd wrote: post #210

My wife owns an email address in Gmail and you wouldn't think it was a very popular email address. Until of course someone's account information at numerous shopping sites began showing up. My wife contacted this person by phone and it turned out to be an elderly woman. The elderly woman was not having it and began arguing with my wife about whose email address it was. The elderly woman ranted on and on about HOW DAR…

I shared a story in another thread recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24307375) about my relatively benign Gmail being misused, but I had forgotten about the really weird encounter I had a couple of years ago.

A woman texted me via iMessage that she was calling out sick to her job at a local public school. I replied that I hoped she felt better, but clearly had a wrong number.

She insisted that I was Joanna, an Occupational Therapist at this school. (Emma gave me this number!). Clearly I was not, and did not know Emma, or any of the other things that were going on. Then she accused me of stealing Joanna's phone number.

Turns out -- if you send an iMessage to someone in your Contacts, it does the first lookup by email, NOT by phone number. By assuming Joanna had my email address -- something lots of people seem to think is theirs -- I ended up also getting their iMessages.

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

#262

Post by sandebert » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 4:25 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…

> Hard to believe people use those kinds of addresses for official business and applying for jobs, but they do.

A couple of years back, a friend was doing some recruiting. One of the applicants had the email address givesdamngreathead@hotmail.com.

(Translated, it was in another language.)

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

#263

Post by rbritton » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 4:32 PM UTC

I've had my own share of this. Among the emails I've received, there have been some from within the New Zealand Parliament, a fire department in Oregon, an OB/GYN on the east coast of the US, car loans, home loans, concert tickets, plane tickets, and other less consequential things.

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

#264

Post by WorldMaker » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

shocks wrote: post #127

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.

My email address is *@example.tld Fails a lot of validations because ‘example’ can’t possible by right eh?!

This one actually almost makes sense because of RFC 2606 [1]. It reserves the .example TLD as well as example.com, example.org, and example.net as only example domains that cannot/should not be used. Back when .com/.net/.org were "the only TLDs that matter" a blanket check for example in the second level made some sense, and/or to just assume that RFC 2606 would apply to future TLDs (despite it being quite specific in which domains it reserved).

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2606

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

#265

Post by ufmace » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 5:17 PM UTC

kbaker wrote: post #28

jameslk wrote: post #7

I have one of these accounts (it's a dictionary word), and I can confirm everything the author has said is true. I receive constant onboarding emails I can't opt out of, "so and so thinks you're cute" dating profile notifications, weekly account recovery notifications, all kinds of random crap that was meant for someone else but due to slight misspellings come to me, such as important contracts from lawyers, endless…

Sorry to hear that. As a fellow 'OG' gmail user, I feel your pain, but between the constant 2-3 daily unsubscribe hits and many many Gmail filters it is actually manageable and usable. Google's "targeted-journalist-level" Advanced Protection Program means I don't have to worry about password resets or account recovery stuff on the account. Though I have lost track of the number of services I didn't have immediate acc…

I got on Google's APP a while ago. Google is great for this specific purpose - if there's one thing you can count on Google for, it's never ever listening to their customers, no matter what.

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

#266

Post by DamnInteresting » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 5:28 PM UTC

gregd wrote: post #210

My wife owns an email address in Gmail and you wouldn't think it was a very popular email address. Until of course someone's account information at numerous shopping sites began showing up. My wife contacted this person by phone and it turned out to be an elderly woman. The elderly woman was not having it and began arguing with my wife about whose email address it was. The elderly woman ranted on and on about HOW DAR…

I've had a similar experience quite recently. I started getting legit automated emails for someone named "John", some emails regarding an effort to buy a house, others from a doctor's office. Some of the emails looked rather important, such as doctor appointment details, so I engaged in some Internet sleuthing, and in a few days I found the person. They were an elderly gent who had the same Gmail handle as me, but his with a numeral suffix.

I tried emailing the gent to explain, but received no reply. So I've just been forwarding those emails to the fellow's real address when they arrive. Perhaps he never checks email, hence his lack of reply to my earlier note, but I forward just in case.

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

#267

Post by TonyTrapp » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 6:03 PM UTC

My GMail account (that I don't really use for anything apart for having a Google account) apparently shares its name with a Brazilian game store chain. I have received a number of complaints (in Portuguese) that were apparently about games not running properly. Someone also tried to send some money to it via PayPal, and it was clearly not directed at me. Luckily a quick call to PayPal resolved this issue.

Edit: Apparently some guy found it funny to sign up using that GMail address on a Brazilian dating website. And no, the address itself isn't a Portuguese term or anything.

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

#268

Post by TonyTrapp » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 6:13 PM UTC

TonyTrapp wrote: post #267

My GMail account (that I don't really use for anything apart for having a Google account) apparently shares its name with a Brazilian game store chain. I have received a number of complaints (in Portuguese) that were apparently about games not running properly. Someone also tried to send some money to it via PayPal, and it was clearly not directed at me. Luckily a quick call to PayPal resolved this issue. Edit: Appar…

Another anecdote: I have another email address (first_last@isp) and my last name is one of those that are very common but exist with several different spellings. One day I got a message from a freshly-wed lady, and she intended to send the mail to her husband. From the mail it seemed like she took his last name when they married, which made it even funnier that she mistyped it in the email address she sent the mail to. :)

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

#269

Post by westondeboer » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 7:12 PM UTC

I changed the password once for someones bank account because I didn't want to keep getting their bank info every month.

That is the only time I have done that.

Add I Get a forgotten password once a week for some random account that isn't mine.

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

#270

Post by Baeocystin » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 7:43 PM UTC

techslave wrote: post #230

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.

...for now, yes. I just don't trust them to keep that policy, you know? Microsoft & Yahoo already recycle, and I am willing to bet that Google will eventually, too.