The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

Re:The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account by murrayb on Thursday September 03, 2020 @03:34AM (#24361645)

I have a firstname.lastname Gmail account. Neither frst or last are particularly common. There are various people around the planet who hand out my address as there own, I get invoices on a regular basis but also correspondence from real estate agents and legal correspondence. Most recently I spam listed a Canadian telco because some gentleman in Canada is joyfully handing out my address. On the other hand I very rarely get someone else's snail mail and if I do it is for a neighbour I know a house or two away and never someone in another country :-)

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Re:The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account by teraku on Thursday September 03, 2020 @08:10AM (#24363190)

"." is a ghost character for gmail.

firstname.lastname (at) gmail and firstnamelastname (at) gmail

are the same address.

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150?hl=en

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Re:The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account by TuringNYC on Thursday September 03, 2020 @09:52AM (#24364022)

Not quite as I learned, for connected services. If you registered originally as [email protected] and use [email protected] it works fine for mail. For Log-in-with-Google, it goes back to [email protected] and many websites treat that as a distinct account. Now you end up with two distinct accounts on the "same" gmail. Not great.

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Re:The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account by chousuke on Thursday September 03, 2020 @05:11AM (#24362178)

It can also be that instead of people giving your Gmail address as their own, the receiver ignores the domain and just assumes that it's @gmail.com. I've had that happen a couple times.

People also get very confused about + in addresses.

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Re:The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account by davchana on Thursday September 10, 2020 @08:38PM (#24438072)

Yes, i have people sending me emails at [email protected], instead of [email protected]. How I know? They type both addresses just to be sure.

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Re:The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account by wyclif on Thursday September 03, 2020 @03:46AM (#24361714)

I get loads of invoices, too, from all over the Commonwealth. The more I think about it, the more I suspect the author is right: there are a lot of people out there who think you can just type someone's last name into webmail and it's just going to magically go to the person they intended.

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Re:The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account by ponker on Thursday September 03, 2020 @04:04AM (#24361810)

Well that is how Gmail works if it finds a contact in your address book... type the name and it autocompletes. You could be on the receiving end of autocomplete failures that go unnoticed by the sender.

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Re:The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account by wyclif on Thursday September 03, 2020 @04:17AM (#24361873)

I considered that, but then I checked and saw that almost all of them are coming from other domains, and often non-webmail domains. Of course, whatever email management software or app they're using on their end could be doing that, too.

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Re:The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account by ponker on Thursday September 03, 2020 @04:44AM (#24362014)

I use exclusively custom domain emails but use Gmail to manage all of them.

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Re:The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account by RandoHolmes on Thursday September 03, 2020 @09:54AM (#24364056)

I have the same format for my gmail account, with a second that has a middle initial, and neither account ever really gets that sort of traffic.

Literally the only time I've gotten something that was for another person is when someone else with my exact name purchased something medical and they emailed the receipt to "[email protected]". It turns out that if gmail receives an email in that format and all they find is "[email protected]", they'll go ahead and stuff it into that inbox.

I was able to track the person down, call them, explain what happened, forward the email to them, and delete it.

My name isn't super uncommon, but for whatever reason I don't get those sorts of emails.

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