It's not even OG; just initialsurname@bigmailprovider is enough to get your account filled with people's personal information.
The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
231–240 of 285 posts
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#232I know a guy who owns a domain in my country equivalent to user.com or test.com or something like that. He frequently knows what new tech companies are about to launch because devs doing local testing sometimes put the email as blahblah@user.com and he gets all the onboarding emails.
He received one while we were working on a project together and opened it up to show me. I thought it's kinda hilarious that some dev is just chucking that in their sign up page but he actually gets a real email because of it.
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#233I know a guy who owns a domain in my country equivalent to user.com or test.com or something like that. He frequently knows what new tech companies are about to launch because devs doing local testing sometimes put the email as blahblah@user.com and he gets all the onboarding emails. He received one while we were working on a project together and opened it up to show me. I thought it's kinda hilarious that some dev i…
I get a surprising amount of personal email from several people who mistype their own email quite consistently. Everything from mortgage info to job offers and updates from teachers. And I don’t have a special mailbox name or domain. Can’t imagine how much someone with a domain like that might actually get.
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#234I 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…
> Google's "targeted-journalist-level" Advanced Protection Program
Thanks, I never heard of that before. https://landing.google.com/advancedprotection/
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#235Wild.
I have never understood the cache or appeal of having a particular address at Gmail or Yahoo or Outlook or whatever. By the time Gmail happened, I was already many years into using my own domain for email. Why would I want an address at an advertising company?
Still, amusing tales.
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a firstname.lastname Gmail account. Neither frst or last are particularly common. There are various people around the planet who hand out my address as there own, I get invoices on a regular basis but also correspondence from real estate agents and legal correspondence. Most recently I spam listed a Canadian telco because some gentleman in Canada is joyfully handing out my address. On the other hand I very rar…
"." is a ghost character for gmail. firstname.lastname (at) gmail and firstnamelastname (at) gmail are the same address. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150?hl=en
Not quite as I learned, for connected services. If you registered originally as johndoe@gmail.com and use john.doe@gmail.com it works fine for mail. For Log-in-with-Google, it goes back to johndoe@gmail.com and many websites treat that as a distinct account. Now you end up with two distinct accounts on the "same" gmail. Not great.
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a firstname.lastname Gmail account. Neither frst or last are particularly common. There are various people around the planet who hand out my address as there own, I get invoices on a regular basis but also correspondence from real estate agents and legal correspondence. Most recently I spam listed a Canadian telco because some gentleman in Canada is joyfully handing out my address. On the other hand I very rar…
I have the same format for my gmail account, with a second that has a middle initial, and neither account ever really gets that sort of traffic.
Literally the only time I've gotten something that was for another person is when someone else with my exact name purchased something medical and they emailed the receipt to "firstnamelastname@gmail.com". It turns out that if gmail receives an email in that format and all they find is "firstname.lastname@gmail.com", they'll go ahead and stuff it into that inbox.
I was able to track the person down, call them, explain what happened, forward the email to them, and delete it.
My name isn't super uncommon, but for whatever reason I don't get those sorts of emails.
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most 'FluffyBunny...' style addresses and usernames I see tend to end in a 2 digit number which is obviously the user's birth year, which they added when told that plain old 'FluffyBunny' wasn't available. Not a very sensible idea, given how many sites have "What year where you born?" as one of their security questions.
>"What year where you born?" Anecdata from me: I've never seen this as a security question, I'm willing to concede that I didn't notice it because I just pick a security question at random and record it in my password database with a made up answer so that I can satisfy their test later on without using a real, guessable answer.
I personally think those sorts of "security" questions are stupid and I have a standard answer to all of the security questions so I don't have to remember what I put.
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#239A friend of mine made https://guide.mlz.me/ "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Correctly Validating Customer's Email Addresses". He doesn't send it to everyone who typos an email address, but for businesses - especially ones that send him financial data unsolicited - the level of snark is appropriate.
This guide advocates for some pretty silly best practices. It’s very hung up on making sure the user types the right email address on account registration, having them type it twice, making them provide some sort of security question ( before their account is created , mind you!), making sure the question is answered correctly by the person clicking the link, etc etc. None of that is necessary. Your signup form can l…
> It’s very hung up on making sure the user types the right email address on account registration, having them type it twice, making them provide some sort of security question (before their account is created, mind you!), making sure the question is answered correctly by the person clicking the link, etc etc.
No, it's saying you can do this, this, _or_ this. It's giving you options, not telling you to do everything on it.
Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account
#240My wife has an old gmail account which is her first initial and last name. She set up email forwarding to another account several years ago promptly forgot about it. Unfortunately she picked her original password before I introduced her to password managers and so now her original account has been taken over by someone.
Interestingly enough that email forwarding she set up still occurs and she has all of the received email for her attacker(s) including all the security notices. I figured it would be a bunch of people emailing angry that they received spam from the account. Instead it’s a bunch of disjointed English talking about the weather - back and forth messages such as “in Tuesday we will have windy”. There are several iOS devices now logged into it. I am baffled yet insanely curious.
Unfortunately even though this email forwarding has been set up for more than a decade, googles automated account recovery does not recognize her request and we can’t get the original flast@gmail.com address back.
Anyone at google have thoughts? I can drop my personal contact info if so.