Similar concerns were raised a couple of years ago when Yahoo thought (foolishly) that it would be a good idea to "recycle" email addresses:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/20/tech/web/yahoo-recycled-email/
Do they still do it? That's horrific
Re:Dead googlecode URLs on GitHub
by JeremyBanks on Friday July 22, 2016 @06:39PM
(#12147285)
Hotmail/Outlook used to(?) do this as well.
I had an account expire ~10 years ago. Somebody else registered the address and used it for several years, then eventually let it expire as well. Last year, I re-registered it, and used it to recover access to an account I created a long long time ago.
I'm still trying to recover my neopets account from 15 years ago, I used a bad birthdate
Actually, this is not a new idea. Entire block of IP adresses are known to have been highjacked this way and are now used for spam purposes. Squatters reclaim the block with various ploys including registering an abandoned domain name to accept email to the point-of-contact domain contact. [0]
Re:Dead googlecode URLs on GitHub
by ocdtrekkie on Friday July 22, 2016 @07:25PM
(#12147508)
I know it's kinda a life commitment, but if I ever used a domain as an identity representation of me... I'm going to keep it forever.
Re-registering the domain would be easy and capturing/selling the credentials would be easy. Once you get an email running a "forgot password" on the "to" address across the top 500 domains might yield something fun. Also catching these specific type domains in drop would be easy with firstname/lastname scan. Cheap as well. Basically fraud based domain squatting.