51–60 of 241 posts
I’ve received some sensitive/PII content over the years.
I’ve wondered if this person has access to any of my information?
Not necessarily related to this post, but wonder why and how this could happen.
My gmail address is first.last@gmail.com. From time to time (and for years) I get someone else’s at firstlast@gmail.com. I thought that a Gmail account that was first.last@gmail also allowed for email sent to firstlast@gmail (no period) to reach my inbox as well. I’ve received some sensitive/PII content over the years. I’ve wondered if this person has access to any of my information? Not necessarily related to this p…
No. They have just told someone your email address and that someone has sent you stuff. Anyone can do that, if they dream up your email address. People having the same name are a lot more likely to do that.
Happened to me as well. I was the first one of the 50 people or so carrying my name to register "first[.]last@gmail.com" back in 2004. At least two of my namesakes have since mistakenly used my email address. Some people just aren't very detail-oriented.
My gmail address is first.last@gmail.com. From time to time (and for years) I get someone else’s at firstlast@gmail.com. I thought that a Gmail account that was first.last@gmail also allowed for email sent to firstlast@gmail (no period) to reach my inbox as well. I’ve received some sensitive/PII content over the years. I’ve wondered if this person has access to any of my information? Not necessarily related to this p…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I love this feature and wish something like it would come to Gmail. I can't rely on iCloud Mail anymore due to its overly aggressive silent spam filtering. Not great if you're trying to log into an account, and you can't receive the recovery emails for that account.
gmail sucks, I'm getting 2-3 spam emails a day, am I the only one?
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can use a custom domain with most providers, so when they go dark you can at least migrate to another one.
Two things about fronting with your own domain: 1. You have to own that domain forever, until or at least until you're 100% confident that an email intended for you will never be sent to that domain ever again. Even then, there are security risks with giving up the domain. 2. You give up some privacy. You can use mailbox aliases but it doesn't really matter if all the mailboxes are tied to a domain registered to your…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm interested. How does it differ from using: name+service@gmail.com or service@myowndomain.com ...to figure out where the spam originated?
> service@myowndomain.com Just be aware that this may be very confusing to customer support agents: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32475178
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 li…
FWIW, Firefox's Relay integrates into Bitwarden so you can generate emails on the fly when creating new accounts. Downside and upside is that I never know what my email address or password is.
The huge benefit is I can write down an email that'll work because I own @somedomain.mozmail.com and it'll always redirect. I do the same thing with cloudflare because I also own myrealname.com
But honestly I hate all this because the real problem is that email is a bottleneck and it is stickier than phone numbers. But my email is floating around on a bunch of lists because I've had it for years. Frankly, gmail is pretty bad about removing spam. There's a lot of spam I catch using simple filters from Thunderbird.
The extra benefit is that I'm planning on moving away from gmail and all these relays make it easier to redirect everything to a new location. So I still recommend it. You can shutdown addresses that are being abused or shared more easily but that's hard to do with your long term email address.