Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Someone keeps trying to reset my Facebook password

reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 246 posts

Re: Someone keeps trying to reset my Facebook password

#121

Post by kentonv »

chriscjcj wrote: post #97

I used to use an e-mail address a terrific domain name that I own. Without publicly disclosing specifics, it was like this: @ .com Thousands of people with this name, who didn't want to give out their real e-mail address, used this e-mail address when signing up for things online. They probably never thought it would be someone's actual address. I finally had to quit using it because of the tremendous amount of e-mai…

Mine is temporal at gmail. "Temporal" was my teenage gamer tag which I mostly stopped using decades ago, but it's been my gmail address for almost 20 years and changing it is not easy.

The problem is, "temporal" happens to mean "temporary" in Spanish. As soon as Gmail became popular in the Spanish-speaking world, people started using it as a placeholder address.

* Lots of people use it when creating throw-away accounts.

* Sometimes companies use it as a placeholder when they don't know a customer's address. Multiple telecom companies in various countries have done this to me, sometimes populating hundreds of customers' accounts with my email address, such that I receive all of their phone bills, sometimes even with detailed call logs.

* All kinds of students register for university classes using my address resulting in me getting tons of emails from professors. In many cases I could go drop their classes for them if I were evil enough.

* Once a Colombian school gave my address admin access on their school-wide Zoom organization. The really annoying part about this is that Zoom didn't give me any way in the UI to leave the organization, so my account was attached to this school until I complained on Twitter and someone silently fixed it.

* For the last couple months, someone has been scraping Shopify-backed web shops, entering my email address when prompted, putting things in their cart, and then abandoning it, such that I receive an email saying "Hey you left this thing in your cart! Do you still want to buy it?" The emails are always in Spanish, of course. I receive them from like 50 different web sites every day. (Luckily I was able to create a filter for certain Spanish words...)

None of this stuff gets filtered as spam because it does not look like spam to gmail's filters. I have learned it's more productive to block addresses than to mark spam, but this annoyingly takes four clicks per email. I have begged Google to give me a way to filter by language but of course no one is listening.

WIRED even wrote an article about it: https://www.wired.com/story/misplaced-emails-took-over-inbox...

I know, I know, I need to change my email address and probably get off Gmail altogether. It's difficult because I have 20 years of history built around this address.

Re: Someone keeps trying to reset my Facebook password

#122

Post by SeasonalEnnui »

johngladtj wrote: post #2

Funny I keep getting login codes for my Microsoft account. Also there is seemingly no way to figure out who is doing it or how to stop it. I wish I could just disable that form of login, I have a very safe password so the login via email isn't necessary.

Have you got an exchange email or Teams set up on a mobile device? These will generate 2FA requests (but not make any kind of notification on the device).

Re: Someone keeps trying to reset my Facebook password

#123

Post by teddyh »

thunfisch wrote: post #115

Our company owns a one letter domain (e.g. "x.tld"), that follows a quite common sequence. A few months ago we've enabled receiving e-mails for all local parts on that domain. We've received hundreds of notification mails, newsletter subscriptions, alerts (from internal systems disclosing details about infrastructure of giant corporations), etc. It was quite fun, but became annoying quickly. We've then reduced recept…

> We've then reduced reception to the common hostmaster@, ... mailboxes

Just FYI: For a more-or-less authoritative list of what aliases you ought to consider having, see RFC 2142: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2142>

Re: Someone keeps trying to reset my Facebook password

#124

Post by MrMember »

MarkSweep wrote: post #106
chriscjcj wrote: post #97

I used to use an e-mail address a terrific domain name that I own. Without publicly disclosing specifics, it was like this: @ .com Thousands of people with this name, who didn't want to give out their real e-mail address, used this e-mail address when signing up for things online. They probably never thought it would be someone's actual address. I finally had to quit using it because of the tremendous amount of e-mai…

firstname.lastname@gmail.com can have similar problems. Somehow people miscommunicate or misremember their email address and I get a lot of misdirected messages.

I have firstinitiallastname@gmail.com and I get a lot of stuff meant for other people. Someone even used it to sign up for their bank, and said bank apparently didn't require verifying the email address. I don't even have that common of a name.

Re: Someone keeps trying to reset my Facebook password

#125

Post by HelloNurse »

MarkSweep wrote: post #106
chriscjcj wrote: post #97

I used to use an e-mail address a terrific domain name that I own. Without publicly disclosing specifics, it was like this: @ .com Thousands of people with this name, who didn't want to give out their real e-mail address, used this e-mail address when signing up for things online. They probably never thought it would be someone's actual address. I finally had to quit using it because of the tremendous amount of e-mai…

firstname.lastname@gmail.com can have similar problems. Somehow people miscommunicate or misremember their email address and I get a lot of misdirected messages.

I'm in the firstname.lastname@gmail.com club too (common first name and very common surname) and I receive so many mistaken emails that I like to collate them to guess which homonyms are the same person.

I often see repeated attempts to create accounts without reconsidering the email address, and sometimes they succeed (I received repeated invoices for Sky and for an insurance, not to mention occasional ones).

Re: Someone keeps trying to reset my Facebook password

#126

Post by Angostura »

chriscjcj wrote: post #97

I used to use an e-mail address a terrific domain name that I own. Without publicly disclosing specifics, it was like this: @ .com Thousands of people with this name, who didn't want to give out their real e-mail address, used this e-mail address when signing up for things online. They probably never thought it would be someone's actual address. I finally had to quit using it because of the tremendous amount of e-mai…

Hi Bob

Re: Someone keeps trying to reset my Facebook password

#127

Post by cryptoegorophy »

chriscjcj wrote: post #97

I used to use an e-mail address a terrific domain name that I own. Without publicly disclosing specifics, it was like this: @ .com Thousands of people with this name, who didn't want to give out their real e-mail address, used this e-mail address when signing up for things online. They probably never thought it would be someone's actual address. I finally had to quit using it because of the tremendous amount of e-mai…

I treat giving out my email as giving out the social security number. I wish HideMyEmail feature from iOS came in 15 years ago.

Re: Someone keeps trying to reset my Facebook password

#128

Post by dpkirchner »

jareds wrote: post #67
kmfrk wrote: post #64

This is very common with short or otherwise valuable usernames on social media platforms. Initials and so on. That's what 2FA is there for, but you still get the annoying e-mail notifications for attempted sign-ins. Make sure to weigh the pros and cons when you pick your username on the internet. A dedicated e-mail filter to limit the mental attrition might not be the worst idea.

Several years ago I was getting multiple password reset attempts per day from my bank because I picked an easy username to remember 20 years ago. Luckily my bank allowed me to change my user name so I used my password manager to generate a password and used that as my username.

I had a six character username at Fidelity. Every few weeks I'd get a few password reset emails (or something similar, it was a while ago) and my account would get locked. It was a real pain to deal with but I didn't have a choice, such is the suck of a 401k.

Eventually I went with a much longer username and the problem went away.

I don't know if this is related (probably not), but fun fact: Fidelity lets you log in to your account over the phone using numbers[0] -- one per character. Yep, passwords too.

> Use your telephone keypad to convert the letters to numbers. There is no case sensitivity. Substitute an asterisk (*) for all special characters. Here's an example:

> To enter a username, e.g., Smith123, press or say 7-6-4-8-4-1-2-3

> To enter a password, e.g., Lucky1$23, press or say 5-8-2-5-9-1-*-2-3

My 6 letter username mapped to numbers that corresponded to up to 4^6 accounts. That's really bad but not nearly as bad as what they're doing to passwords.

The longer username is both worse and better. Worse because it matches way way more possible accounts and better because (I presume) it matches fewer actual accounts so it gets fewer failed attempts. That's my guess, anyway.

Edit: it is possible that they only allow one account per "folded" username. That increasing the username length resolved the problem immediately suggests otherwise, but like I said, I dunno. I have no insight into their systems.

0: https://www.fidelity.com/customer-service/faqs-managing-your... look for "telephone services"

Re: Someone keeps trying to reset my Facebook password

#129

Post by bhartzer »

I own the domain of my last name. Several family members use (firstname@lastname.com).

I once went to get a new phone at Best Buy, and the employee needed my email address. I gave it to here (firstname@lastname.com) and she insisted that it was NOT my email address. She insisted that it MUST end in @gmail.com or @yahoo.com, something like that.

We frequently sign up for stuff online, and when we enter our email address it won't let us sign up... we figured it is because the email address is too similar to our actual name, the name we've entered in the 'first name' and 'last name' fields (it happens to both me and my wife at least 2-3 times a year).

Re: Someone keeps trying to reset my Facebook password

#130

Post by gsharma »

Johnny555 wrote: post #109
ChildOfChaos wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a simple@Gmail.com address and I have this problem quite a lot, were i get a lot of random stuff. Sometimes from the same person, there starbucks card seems to be linked to it for example. Annoying.

Same, I get a lot of sensitive correspondence, things like divorce settlements from lawyers, mortgage applications, correspondence with doctors with a lot of personal details (that the person cc’ed me on), airline reservations, etc. Usually I’ll reply to the sender and tell them they have the wrong email address, some don’t believe me, sometimes they ask me if I know the person (out of a billion gmail users), some co…

Same situation here! My HN Username @gmail and my last name is a very common last name in India.

I’ve received people’s tax returns (including their SSN), airline tickets and hotel reservations, matrimonial proposals, photographs, etc.

I often used to email back and let people know about the mistake, but rarely do it now unless there is sensitive/urgent information.

To deal with some of the repeated unwanted emails, I have rules created to label those emails with a specific label. I use Google scripts to auto-delete all emails from that label which are older than 365 days. It cleans up repeated transaction emails from Indian banks/credit cards, newsletters, etc. but also gives me a year to retrieve the email if it was actually meant for me.

Post reply on HN