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Google is 'gradually rolling out' option to change your gmail.com address

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Re: Google is 'gradually rolling out' option to change your gmail.com address

#21

Post by loloquwowndueo »

iamben wrote: post #14
sans_souse wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stay tuned I have a pretty cool project I plan on launching very soon. It takes the email alias to the next level, using them as meta tags to actually allow users to trace the source of shady data exchanges. I'm working on the guide and I'm hoping to actually start a community effort here to hold companies accountable for responsible use of PII

I'm interested. How does it differ from using: name+service@gmail.com or service@myowndomain.com ...to figure out where the spam originated?

Everybody knows name+something@ maps to name@ so it’s trivial for bad actors to strip the plus part and just spam you directly, losing the per-correspondent distinction.

Re: Google is 'gradually rolling out' option to change your gmail.com address

#23

Post by HocusLocus »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #9
HocusLocus wrote: post #5

Boss move that I learned under great difficulty: a new temporary gmail alias for every jobsearch.

Hm interesting, do you want to tell why this helps out a lot perhaps?

;) I was a by-invitation-beta in 2004, trust me. Even then spammers knew about the +1234 trick too. The earliest throwaway forwarders suffered from explosive growth and spam netblocks and their queue times varied greatly. The golden age of Viagra and recruiters selling prospect lists to randos. I retreated to gmail for the SPOP and because my original address was Tech Contact for 100+ domains from 1994-2000. Thousands a week. If I was smart I'd have used it as a honeypot to feed a spam blocking service.

Re: Google is 'gradually rolling out' option to change your gmail.com address

#24

Post by EGreg »

I never really had this issue because I used Google Suite with a domain. (That’s what it was called back then.)

So I can have email aliases under that domain, and even choose the alias for outgoing email.

However! This creates an extra security hole. Once I was SIM-swapped (when the attacker calls up a phone company and convinces them to redirect sms to their SIM). I had used it as a second factor at GoDaddy and had to act fast. GoDaddy had already allowed the attacker to authenticate with the sms (dumb!) and port the domain name. I realized what was happening only because the attacker sent “test” emails to my email at the domain. Had they not done that, I might have been none the wiser. I called GoDaddy and got them to cancel it, thankfully. Otherwise they’d have reset passwords armed with email AND phone number.

Since then I use the non-SMS SECOND FACTOR on most services, as NIST had been recommending for a decade now.

I personally recommend using a username+alias@gmail.com which gmail and others support, with a different but easy-to-remember alias per site, so social attackers can’t even correctly say your email to the dude on the phone.

Michael Terpin, a guy I know, got $27 million dollars in crypto stolen a decade ago by a SIM Swapper and sued AT&T for it. Not sure if he won… he moved to Puerto Rico to avoid taxes and brought Brock Pierce and other crypto bros with him LOL.

Re: Google is 'gradually rolling out' option to change your gmail.com address

#25

Post by macrolime »

firefax wrote: post #7

I wish they'd let me recover my original -- I lost my TOTP generator, and the codes I'd written down in a paper notebook were rejected. I even hunted down the electronic copy in case there was a transcription error -- seemed like some failure in their systems was causing me to lose access despite having followed proper procedures. Lost a decade and a half of correspondence dating back to my teenage years. I had impor…

I had something kinda similar happen to my hotmail account. While I didn't lose access to it, I lost more than a decade of correspondence dating back to my teenage years. The reason was that Microsoft at some point required you to "login" once every 30 days. It seems they only counted logins through their web interface or something like that, so even though I was receiving emails daily, I didn't trigger a "login" in their system. They then deleted all my emails, but I could still login.

Re: Google is 'gradually rolling out' option to change your gmail.com address

#26

Post by colechristensen »

firefax wrote: post #17
fosco wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think about my lost address that I obtained when Gmail was invite only. My family still occasionally CCs it and it drives me nuts, I would pay money to at least have it shutdown so they don’t think I received an email. I had email forwarding to another address when stolen and immediately after it was stolen it had the weirdest messages, I tried multiple ways reaching out to google and it still bugs me I was u…

I got mine when it was invite only too, I had it a very long time. I use protonmail now -- I think the "free" model enables providers to shrug and go "hey you don't pay us" (if there is support at all -- I've never been able to speak to a human about this issue)

>I think the "free" model enables providers to shrug and go "hey you don't pay us" (if there is support at all -- I've never been able to speak to a human about this issue)

I also have paid services a lot of money where customer service was nonexistent until I did a credit card chargeback or raised an issue with government regulators.

I'm trying to figure out exactly what I want to push my state legislature to encode into law with regards to customer service minimums that would cover anyone doing business in the state, free or paid.

Re: Google is 'gradually rolling out' option to change your gmail.com address

#27

Post by 3eb7988a1663 »

saint_yossarian wrote: post #20
cedws wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email services in general. My worst nightmare is my email provider (which isn't Google) going dark and losing access to everything.

You can use a custom domain with most providers, so when they go dark you can at least migrate to another one.

That is moving the point of failure to the domain registrar. Which is probably less likely, but you are always relying on someone.

Re: Google is 'gradually rolling out' option to change your gmail.com address

#28

Post by vunderba »

HocusLocus wrote: post #5

Boss move that I learned under great difficulty: a new temporary gmail alias for every jobsearch.

It might be an iCloud+ feature only, but if you're on a Mac - you've already got the ability to generate virtual email addresses on the fly.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/105078

Re: Google is 'gradually rolling out' option to change your gmail.com address

#29

Post by raddan »

HocusLocus wrote: post #5

Boss move that I learned under great difficulty: a new temporary gmail alias for every jobsearch.

You can take this to an extreme (like I do) and use a different email address for every party with whom you communicate. It makes it rather obvious who leaked your email address, and also easy to shut them out (looking at you ActBlue!). It also leads to some amusing personal interactions. I once rebooked a cancelled flight on JetBlue at the ticket counter. When the agent saw my email she said “wow, you must really like JetBlue.” I just nodded but I was laughing inside because it’s definitely the opposite!

Re: Google is 'gradually rolling out' option to change your gmail.com address

#30

Post by pretext-1 »

nmstoker wrote: post #4

Could this be a sign that Google is starting to think again? For an organisation that often does deeply intelligent things, they spend such a lot of time treating their users unnecessarily poorly because obvious implications seem not to occur to them.

I think they know about them they just don’t care enough to spend money on fixing them. They are still primarily an ad company today and their users are still primarily the product not customers.
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