Way back when, I got a Yahoo email like <HN_username>@yahoo.com. My last name isn’t unique, but it’s not exactly Smith. It’s amazing how many other people have mistyped it. To this day, I still get emails meant for other people.

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.