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The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

krebsonsecurity.com

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

#271

Post by LorenPechtel »

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'm lucky. I have .@gmail.com, I haven't had a single case of misuse.

On the other hand, it appears my name is unique in the world. The only things I've ever found under my name that weren't written by me appear to be people scraping for content and trashing the format--I've found plenty of examples of words attributed to me that were really quotes.

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

#273

Post by joveian »

ValentineC wrote: post #197
bleepblorp wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pr…

Just be careful that your DNS is sufficiently restricted; I've heard of DNS being the weak point for taking over accounts involving custom domains.

I'm surprised there aren't more in person or by mail verification options available. I guess partly due to the "who pays for it" aspect (and people moving, etc., plus no verificaion method is completely accurate), but the current state of authenticating online accounts is rather worrying in general and allows anyone anywhere in the world to try to take over your accounts.

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

#274

Post by zwayhowder »

refurb wrote: post #101
zwayhowder wrote: post #8

For three years in a row I received an amazon gift card on father's day. Always intended for as far as I can tell the same person who has the same first initial and last name as me. I contacted Amazon about it the first time and they wouldn't cancel it or issue a refund because I was the recipient, not the purchaser. I worry that someone has been written out of their Dad's will because he thinks they have forgotten f…

I have lastname[initial]@gmail.com and it’s not a terribly common name, but I’ve gotten Interac payments (Canada) sent to me for little league practice (emailed back and they apologized). Most recently I’ve been getting a cell phone bill for a South African person. It had their address so I looked it up on gMaps and it was a small home in a shantytown. I just received an email telling me the service was being cut off…

I had another person with the same name as me put my email address in his resume. I started getting a heap of emails to come in for interviews, in a small town in Northern Ireland that my family emigrated to Australia from 150 years ago.

Fortunately his phone number was in the emails, so I called him and had a great chat, he got his Nan on the phone and we spent ages walking through our family tree finding connections.

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

#275

Post by bleepblorp »

ValentineC wrote: post #197
bleepblorp wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pr…

I'd personally tie a domain to a paid email account hosted by a provider that is in a sound market position (not e.g. Yahoo), doesn't have a reputation for arbitrarily revoking accounts (not Google), and doesn't have overly aggressive spam controls (not Microsoft).

That doesn't leave many options.

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

#276

Post by refurb »

zwayhowder wrote: post #274
refurb wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have lastname[initial]@gmail.com and it’s not a terribly common name, but I’ve gotten Interac payments (Canada) sent to me for little league practice (emailed back and they apologized). Most recently I’ve been getting a cell phone bill for a South African person. It had their address so I looked it up on gMaps and it was a small home in a shantytown. I just received an email telling me the service was being cut off…

I had another person with the same name as me put my email address in his resume. I started getting a heap of emails to come in for interviews, in a small town in Northern Ireland that my family emigrated to Australia from 150 years ago. Fortunately his phone number was in the emails, so I called him and had a great chat, he got his Nan on the phone and we spent ages walking through our family tree finding connection…

That is a super cool story!

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

#277

Post by bane »

I have an original gmail address, going back to August of 2004 (gmail launched in beta in April, 2004). The username is a word in a non-English language that at the time had zero hits on Google. Even today, a search for that username nets Until about 3-4 years ago, I basically didn't get any spam or these kinds of accidental "put the wrong email in the signup box". Then one-by-one, I started getting them. Facebook account request, bank signups, tinder account verification emails, twitch, the works.

Sometimes I'll get half a dozen emails clearly initiated by somebody trying to get access to some account somewhere and my email address was provided as a backup. Occasionally, I'll get notifications that somebody is trying to rest my password.

I wonder sometimes, with email and the internet being so ubiquitous and for so long, how is it that people don't honestly know their own addresses? And then I'll get peaks into the lives of these people every once in a while. Pictures from their facebook account, emails from real estate brokers, from "hookups" and so on.

Every once in a while, if there's an obvious way to contact somebody, and the emails seem like they're from legitimate people, I'll respond and say something like "wrong email address." or something. About 1 out of 20 times the person on the other end will fight back informing me that I, in fact, "am wrong about my email address and yes I can't avoid making my childcare payment this lamely."

It's gotten frustrating, the Eternal September has now impacted one of the oldest continuous ways I've used the internet, a way I've jealously guarded and preserved from spammers, scammers, and all other form of miscreant, only for that judicious and careful defense to be washed effortlessly away by people who aren't even aware what their own on-line identity is.

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

#278

Post by ffggvv »

my account on twitter is simply my sirname. however, i unfortunately share it w/ some random politician in another country. i get at least one notification a day from someone trying to tag them and harass/troll them. the most annoying thing is when they are replying directly to a tweet from the politicians account but still manage to tag me instead of them.

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

#279

Post by muzani »

cik wrote: post #117
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…

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.

You could probably put a +. Instead of c@cik.com, it could be c+hn@cik.com or c+jobs@cik.com. These would still forward it to c@cik.com [0]

This has the side effect of knowing who has been selling out your email to spammers.

[0] https://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~watrous/plus-signs-in-email-addr...

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