Email is hard and confusing for a lot of people. It's easy for us to forget that.
It's a slippery slope though - forget worrying about remembering or managing passwords, you have to deal with variations of an email address too.
Further, email clients will reply from whatever address you used to setup the client. Maybe you can add aliases, but that will be time-consuming, and even where supported there's usually a single-digit limit. This can cause real headaches - e.g. "reply with `UNSUBSCRIBE` in the subject line to be removed from this list" and being unable to reply from the right email address.
For instance, my very early-adopter Gmail address has a '.' in the address but it is an entirely different account from the one without. If you send mail to the one without the '.' I do not receive it.
There aren't a lot of people who are using my email, one is an older folk who uses it, and I always mean to contact him, and one was a DJ which accidentally used my email address instead of his.
it threw me in circles.
My email is <first name><middle initial>@gmail.com (six characters total) and I get about 1-1.5 misdirected emails per day. Receipts, phone bills, homework, meeting minutes, personal messages that someone passed away, angry email from a homeowner to his general contractor (in Botswana), and even a international love letter.
It's quite annoying, but the worst is sites that make it very hard to unsubscribe, or don't understand that it's possible for someone to enter an email address that doesn't belong to them in a form. In one case (a bank), I actually had to call customer service on the phone to get them to disassociate my email address with someone's account.
In the case of the love letter, I thought I should reply to say that the intended recipient didn't get the message, but when I did, the sender got really confused and didn't understand that she had mis-typed the address.
I've got an annual delivery of an expensive watch in my inbox like clockwork every year.
I'd stop using that account in a second, except I bought ~$100 worth of Android apps over the years using that email address and last time I looked I couldn't transfer them to a new account.
firstname.lastname AT nhs dot net
Or firstname.lastnameNUMBER if there's more than one person with your name.
Since the NHS is one of the largest employers in the world you'll find things like john.doe58@
It sucks.
> ".example" is recommended for use in documentation or as examples.
Using example.[com|org] for testing feels like shoehorning. I wish IANA had reserved test.com, because that's what feels right when testing.
After setting up a DMARC reporting address for my own domain I was surprised at the amount of emails supposedly from my addresses that are getting rejected, mostly by gmail and yahoo.
I'm not getting rid of my gmail address... mine ... though I do have another address I use, and may start using that one more once I move the email hosting (on my todo list for over a year).
On the other hand, I was getting Allstate billing notices for someone else and I was surprised how well they handled it. When I called, they understood that I was a third party and apologized. They were able to look at a record of all the email sent and verify I had not received any sensitive information (only last 4 digits of account number, first name, and bill total). They removed my email address and said they would contact their customer immediately.
The only way they could have handled it better would have been following best practices and sending a verification link as their first email. :)
Turns out people don't know their actual physical addresses either any more.
Just move countries and cities often enough, and throw some business travel in for good measure, and it's pretty easy for that to happen. I've e.g. had similar sounding zip codes in a variety of cities and countries, and nearly the same street name within a city. After a while you start to very easily make mistakes.
Whereas "[email protected]" (or more likely gmail.com) can be arrived at by multiple people named "Firstname Lastname", you don't have to worry about it if your email address is generated via:
echo "$(< /dev/urandom tr -dc a-z0-9 | head -c 12)@example.com"You'd be better off taking an "xkcd" or "gfycat" approach and making your e-mail "[email protected]" or "[email protected]".
Turns out that thousands of people every year think they are being super clever by putting my email address in the "From" field. So of course I get zillions of "receipts" for these eCards.
"Sister, I hope you feel better soon"
...is the most popular by far.
I stopped looking at them years ago but there's often some very personal information included and if I were an evil supervillain it would be trivial for me to use a lot of these eCards to blackmail people!
Fortunately for these people there's a highly ethical person at the helm of that email address that filters them all right into the trash.