Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?

Re:Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who s... by invaliduser on Friday April 22, 2022 @03:09AM (#31119087)

Same here. My name is very common and I have an email similar to John Smith <[email protected]>, and I have around 10 people around the world named like me or similarly that use my email for everything. I receive, almost weekly, paid invoices, flight tickets, appointment reminders, a teen soccer club newsletter, new instagram accounts, etc anything you can imagine really.

A few years ago I tried to contact some of my other selfs to ask them to mind their email, but never got any response. I'm just ignoring them now or hitting the spam button (after all, the senders should have a process to check the address instead of taking erroneous email addresses written by hand on paper).

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Re:Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who s... by Moru on Friday April 22, 2022 @03:29AM (#31119179)

My wife has had the same problem for a long time. What finaly got through was to contact one of the travel agencies to point out that she got plane tickets in someone elses name and to please talk to this woman that she has the wrong idea about her email adress. Has been quiet for a few years now.

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Re:Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who s... by wyclif on Friday April 22, 2022 @03:51AM (#31119274)

My real surname isn't a common one, so I went ahead and grabbed [email protected] in March 2004 when Evan Williams sent me a Gmail invite. But my surname is English and one that is predominately found in the UK, Canada, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. So I sometimes get invoices, signups, verifications, and other junk from someplace in Australia and those other English-speaking countries. I've also found it's a waste of time to correct it. Once an address is "out there" in the wild, it's going to get passed around.

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