That sounds like an unnecessarily aggressive way to handle that. It certainly could have been an honest mistake on the part of the user who owned that account. Why not just change the email address on the account?

If you signed up for gmail or similar early, then dumbasses of the world use your email address as 'their email' dozens of times a day for random internet accounts because it's also their name, and they don't understand or don't care that it isn't their email address.

It gets tiring fast and services don't deal with this usecase that well other than 'forget password'. That guy was the initial asshole to signup using an email address that wasn't theirs.

People don't seem to understand just how common this problem is with any sort of initial.lastname@gmail address. It is insane to me that so many major big name companies do ZERO email verification on signups and just start spamming me with with garbage every time some idiot uses my email address and expect me to "unsubscribe" to something I never subscribed to in the first place.

I've had this happen to me, getting emails about credit score applications and u-haul rentals and whatnot. I can't even contact many of these companies to fix it except creating an account which I'm obviously not going to do.

Oh my yes! I had an early beta gmail account. From when you couldn't just sign up but had to be invited by another user.

so my email address is very simple. I have someone from almost every English speaking country who regularly uses my email address for all things mundane, profane, inane and urbane.

I used to respond to each and every one if possible, politely asking them to remove me from the list, stop putting my email down on whatever forms they were filling out or to tell the person they got the email address from to use their own or be more careful when filling it out. It's been going on so long and gotten so bad that I just can't anymore.

examples of things I have received mistakenly in my email that were clearly the result of someone entering them in a form or writing the down to be used by someone else.

Job interview confirmations for fields I am not and have never been involved with

letters from grandma

plane ticket, concert ticket, train ticket, parking ticket and other types of ticket confirmation and notifications.

boating licenses

requests to accept changes to architectural plans for a house

lease and housing agreements

notices to appear in court

electronic receipts of every sort

prescription drug receipts

confidential internal company information

and more.

This may or may not be relevant:

>Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.

what is my identity id for me to decide and not for you to claim. my identity on HN is my messages here, nothing else. if you need more than that you are welcome to ask and we can establish another identity outside this platform

It was the second or third time someone had used my email for Instagram.