91–100 of 246 posts
Every week or so they lock my account due to "suspicious activity" even though I haven't used my account.
I have all the security features and such turned on like MFA and a strong password (that I have to change like every week after every time my account gets locked).
There is no useful info in the security logs. I have no idea what to do to stop this from happening.
I have an alias that is a vaguely common name, which is firstname.lastname@gmail.com Once a year or so somebody tries to get into that gmail or associated social media account with a bunch of password-reset emails. I'm pretty sure it's someone with a similar name who is slightly misspelling their email, messing up the dot (gmail ignores dots but other systems don't), etc.
I have an old email with my (common) first name and a low number. Every now and then I get registration emails from various children's online games.
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.
So it is a "one in a million" to randomly guess what the code is on any given login.
But it is "one in a million" for each Microsoft account you know about - and if they have millions of email addresses, and automate it each day (I also get attempts 1-2 times per day).
Yes - the odds are small - but there is a greater than 0% chance someone can randomly get into your Microsoft account - and there is no way to stop it - even with 2FA etc - this bypasses all of that!!!
Crazy...
Happened the other way to me once. When I made my Gmail account I had a . in it. Emails sent from me go from this email address. My Facebook email for ages was my school email (as is tradition, right?) and one day someone registered as my actual email around the time I was doing a bunch of address consolidation because my school was moving all historical accounts to a separate subdomain. I clicked to confirm foolishl…
Fun fact: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150
Maybe unrelated, but I think some people do this to check (at least partially) what email is tied to an account. E.g. if you suspect an anonymous instagram user to be your friend Bob, you can invoke the reset email procedure to see We sent an email to bo****@gm***.com Which gives you a hint
@.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-mail that wasn't directed at me. Most of it looked legit enough to the spam filters to allow through.
I temporarily turned that account on about 5 years ago and it was getting about 3,000 garbage messages per day.
I thought having a cool e-mail address would be great, but not any more. I switched to an address that, while easy to say and tell people, it's very unusual and it's very unlikely someone else would ever come up with it.
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…
Sometimes from the same person, there starbucks card seems to be linked to it for example. Annoying.
I think the better question is why facebook sends mails from facebookmail.com and metamail.com? Any sensible person would expect those to be scams, but they are real. https://www.facebook.com/help/1634546593478660