I keep that old account for 2 purposes:
1. It amuses me. I log in and clear it out once a year or so.
2. At various times I’ve had coworkers who didn’t believe it was common for people to enter someone else’s email address when registering for a sensitive system. When that happens, I’ve taken them to my old Yahoo webmail. Oh look, another kstrauser’s loan paperwork!
I can only imagine what that’d be like if it were at Gmail and not Yahoo.
Sometimes from the same person, there starbucks card seems to be linked to it for example. Annoying.
Usually I’ll reply to the sender and tell them they have the wrong email address, some don’t believe me, sometimes they ask me if I know the person (out of a billion gmail users), some complain that I took to long to tell them about the wrong address, and sometimes a lawyer will direct me to delete all copies of the errant email…
I always reply back to tell them that the email lands on multiple devices and is downloaded and backed up automatically and to see if they want to pay me on a time and materials basis or if they want a project based fee. None have been willing to pay me to cleanup their mistake.
Way back when I signed up with gmail, I was happy to get a [email protected] address, now I wish I’d gone with something more obscure.
I’ve received people’s tax returns (including their SSN), airline tickets and hotel reservations, matrimonial proposals, photographs, etc.
I often used to email back and let people know about the mistake, but rarely do it now unless there is sensitive/urgent information.
To deal with some of the repeated unwanted emails, I have rules created to label those emails with a specific label. I use Google scripts to auto-delete all emails from that label which are older than 365 days. It cleans up repeated transaction emails from Indian banks/credit cards, newsletters, etc. but also gives me a year to retrieve the email if it was actually meant for me.
Misplaced periods give me all sorts of other people's emails - new cars, new mortgages, new bank accounts, new home purchases that are not in my name or identity (based on the names I understand the confusion) - all sorts of things that I'm not doing IRL. Sometimes I try to reach out to the sender and get them to correct the email address, sometimes I just unsubscribe
I often see repeated attempts to create accounts without reconsidering the email address, and sometimes they succeed (I received repeated invoices for Sky and for an insurance, not to mention occasional ones).
Also, my daughter has [email protected] and there is another lady with the address [email protected] (yes, a typo in her first name, duplicating one of the letters) and of course she keep receiving her emails and vice versa. Same solution - they mutually agreed to forward messages to the right person and delete them afterwards.
First world problems...
After a couple of years gave up on that address as it was getting dozens of messages a day (a lot of them legit email, sent to the wrong address - including bank statements, shipping orders, etc.)
My <common-name>@<common-name>.com address gets incessant password reset requests for every major online site in existence. (I should have been clearer about this; sorry.)
I am suggesting that, by having strange or very unique e-mail address, you can fairly effectively mitigate this phenomenon.
The problem is, "temporal" happens to mean "temporary" in Spanish. As soon as Gmail became popular in the Spanish-speaking world, people started using it as a placeholder address.
* Lots of people use it when creating throw-away accounts.
* Sometimes companies use it as a placeholder when they don't know a customer's address. Multiple telecom companies in various countries have done this to me, sometimes populating hundreds of customers' accounts with my email address, such that I receive all of their phone bills, sometimes even with detailed call logs.
* All kinds of students register for university classes using my address resulting in me getting tons of emails from professors. In many cases I could go drop their classes for them if I were evil enough.
* Once a Colombian school gave my address admin access on their school-wide Zoom organization. The really annoying part about this is that Zoom didn't give me any way in the UI to leave the organization, so my account was attached to this school until I complained on Twitter and someone silently fixed it.
* For the last couple months, someone has been scraping Shopify-backed web shops, entering my email address when prompted, putting things in their cart, and then abandoning it, such that I receive an email saying "Hey you left this thing in your cart! Do you still want to buy it?" The emails are always in Spanish, of course. I receive them from like 50 different web sites every day. (Luckily I was able to create a filter for certain Spanish words...)
None of this stuff gets filtered as spam because it does not look like spam to gmail's filters. I have learned it's more productive to block addresses than to mark spam, but this annoyingly takes four clicks per email. I have begged Google to give me a way to filter by language but of course no one is listening.
WIRED even wrote an article about it: https://www.wired.com/story/misplaced-emails-took-over-inbox...
I know, I know, I need to change my email address and probably get off Gmail altogether. It's difficult because I have 20 years of history built around this address.
I still check the gmail account ever so often and it still receives spam. My Fastmail account is perfect even after a year.
I could also choose to pwn his online betting, games, dating, and porn accounts any moment I want. I may or may not have changed his gender preferences on a dating site...
Apparently for many sites, user retention & money are more important than verifying an email address up front. He visits the scummiest betting and dating sites, so I'm not very surprised.
I also get their college results, government assistance, a payday loan company, pinterest and subscriptions to newsletters sent to me for them.
Ive mailed them directly, multiple times but they dont seem to care. I'm now returning the favor, signing them up for all the crappy sites when i need a throwaway.
I continually get a lot of emails, sometimes with private information to first [email protected] where people with my same name just use that without caring that it is not their email address. You probably aren't getting that job offer and you probably aren't getting that bank load approved without being able to see the emails.
For a while I tried to notify the senders but they rarely reacted or even provided a way to contact them. Now I worry about it becoming a scam vector so I just delete them.
To deepen the problem gmail actually ignores periods in email so even if [email protected] already exists its possible create accounts for both [email protected] and [email protected] because although google will absolutely treat those 3 as the same thing and route all messages to any of the above to our first fellow randombob.com treats those as 3 unique email addresses.
This was actually exploited by the fellows that robbed Washington states unemployment system during the pandemic applying for unemployment for folks that didn't need it including humiliatingly enough actual workers who worked for the washington state employment security division. To make their robbery more ergonomic multiple fraudulent accounts were set up with email addresses that differed only by periods. In this instance it only worked of course because they were indeed able to verify their email accounts.
In other instances for example myFico has weak protections on signing up. You can use ANYONE's email address to sign up but strong protections on actually accessing information. This means in effect if someone signs up as you as actually happened to my wife you will never be able to get them to stop spamming you with that persons personal information nor make the person stop giving out your email.
I wasted 15 minutes of my life trying to explain that the address given actually was my wife's email address. Bitched to their credit union/other institutions about the persons financial data being leaked, created a complaint with the FCC. YADA YADA nobody cares about properly implementing email verification or leaking people's financial information.
What's doubly annoying is the US gov is pretty lax at things like unsubscribe links, so I keep getting notifications about his Medicare account that I can't unsubscribe from.
That's forwarding rules are for. Preferably to the email of some judge in his precinct.
(That's what we're doing here right? Bashing on the old and the tech-illiterate?)
Sorry Bob!
I do think that it has gotten better over the years, as more and more places have at least added email verification to their signup flows.
It was a really, really bad idea that sounded funny in my head. That number is scrawled on every toilet wall with "for a good time call: ..."
Every hour of the night...!
See also:
EDIT: https://www.wired.com/1998/09/woz/
(a large article, search for 888-8888)
I have [email protected] and I routinely used to receive emails for [email protected], because of some moron at google that though it was a good idea to ignore dots.
I haven’t checked that gmail account in a while (gmail is just trash at this point, beyond salvage) but I might still be receiving this guy’s loans solicitation or his car insurance certificates. Who knows.
I had never been served a summons before so I was worried about it, I called a lawyer and the lawyer said to just throw the summons in the trash.
Although apparently the guy with the same name as me was going bankrupt or something, his bad debts started showing up on my credit report and I had to mail the reporting agencies to take them off, went on for a few years.
I'm not a big Twitter user, and when I went to log in Twitter for the first time in probably a year or two, I forgot that it was still using my gmail account. I couldn't remember my password, so I did a password reset, received the email, and reset my password.
After looking around a bit, I realized this was not my account. It turned out the previous owner of firstnameLastname.ca also used [email protected]
I ended up making a twitter post basically saying "Hello, I think I accidentally stole your account. If this used to be your account, email me.". A few weeks later I got an email from a fellow with the same name as me, who used to live in Canada but had moved back to England. I was able to change the email on the account and give him back access.
I don’t get why people do this. It’s not like it’s difficult to get a throwaway email account.
<common_name>@<common_name>.com
Thousands of people with this name, who didn't want to give out their real e-mail address, used this e-mail address when signing up for things online. They probably never thought it would be someone's actual address. I finally had to quit using it because of the tremendous amount of e-mail that wasn't directed at me. Most of it looked legit enough to the spam filters to allow through.
I temporarily turned that account on about 5 years ago and it was getting about 3,000 garbage messages per day.
I thought having a cool e-mail address would be great, but not any more. I switched to an address that, while easy to say and tell people, it's very unusual and it's very unlikely someone else would ever come up with it.