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Comment by ricardonunez | Hacker News Reader

Validate email addresses before people can use your service. I lost count how many people have created accounts using my email address just because I happen to own the Gmail for my name. Banks, health records, dating sites and even students emailing me their homework thinking I am their teacher.

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This happens to me and I'm already pissed off. It's a lot of emails from people who miss something in the address. Worse, these same people try several times to retrieve the password of an email that they do not have. Or put my email as a password recovery from their addresses. I get invoices from card accounts, personal emails, work emails.

I've tried to search information in google forums to prevent them from putting my email as a recovery without the confirmation and apparently it is not possible.

They create account in instagram, twitter, uber using my email and I need to go to the service to cancel the use of this address. Many times I have account with this address in certain service, but they sign up using a dot between the names and it ends up redirected to my email.

I try to warn them but just ignore them. Since December I received this gigantic amount of requests to change my password, in none of them did I request it.

https://i.imgur.com/Vh44YXd.png

That... sounds like a nighmare. I've always been slightly bitter about not ever having been able to get the canonical version of my first name or first name last name combination on email services due to having a rather common name, but now I'm kind of glad I wasn't able to after hearing what people in this thread have had to deal with.

Out of curiosity, have you considered switching to a new email address? I've done so once in the past in the process of migrating from an @gmail address to an email address on a domain I own, and the process itself was every bit as slow and painful as anyone can imagine, but I feel the end result was totally worth it because now I can freely switch between providers without worrying about going through that process ever again. Just mentioning this because it seems like switching to an email on a custom domain would largely take care of the issue of random people mistakenly using your email as well.

> Just mentioning this because it seems like switching to an email on a custom domain would largely take care of the issue of random people mistakenly using your email as well.

There are a number of benefits to receiving email to a custom domain on a server you admin.

1. Everyone gets a tracking email like somecompany.com@mycustom.tld

2. Targets of spam can be blocked at the server level: somecompany_leaked_my_email.com@mycustom.tld REJECT

3. Leaked emails can be changed using a timestamp somecompany.YYYYMMDD.com@mycustom.tld

4. Blocked recipients map to blocked senders so somecompany_blocked.com@mycustom.tld will be notified they are blocked.

EDIT: formatting

I used to do this 15-20 years ago, ran my own smtp server too, dropped thing via spamassasin, custom email aliases for each sign up, etc etc.

The life got too short. Pine was ok for simple emails, but HTML mails and attachments meant moving to a graphical system. Wanting access to mail on the go meant squirrelmail which was inferior to most web mail. Then along came smart phones and I was having to run imap on my server too.

I suspect nowadays any emails I sent from my anti server would be scored highly for spam flagging too.

In the end I just used gmail. I can count on one hand the number of spams I get each year.

Not all blocked senders/recipients are sources of spam. I have a list of senders/recipients I refuse communication with for both personal and professional reasons.

Since 2013 I use macOS Server which simplifies the overhead of running a IMAP mail server.

This has happened to me too. Multiple people have used a variation on my GMail address and signed up for stock trading, banks etc., and I keep getting a deluge of their invoices, balance statements, promotional emails etc., and the worst part is none of these orgs will easily approach the person using my email and ask them to update their records. The process of complaining is so cumbersome that I elected instead to redirect their emails into Bin and be done with it, but fresh ones from new addresses do show up occasionally.

The intruiging part of this is they should never have been able to get a GMail address using a variation of my name (say my removing or adding a .) since GMail says they disallow it, but then I just don't get it how so many people have managed to signup to so many services using such an 'impossible' variation of my address? Is there a loophole in GMail or do all these services accept account registrations without email verification?

Either way I'm now seriously considering moving to a different email address and making it something esoteric so no one will think of using it, but that means I'll have to give up on using my name.

>>> The intruiging part of this is they should never have been able to get a GMail address using a variation of my name (say my removing or adding a .) since GMail says they disallow it

Dots are ignored a in gmail address.

johnsmith@gmail.com and john.smith@gmail.com is the same inbox.

I gave up on trying to warn. I have a kid from Ohio who has been doing this since his sophomore year of highschool and is now out of college for at least two years. The most interesting stretch was the first weeks in the dorms ... ohh boy he had some interesting “entertainment” preferences. Of course I also got late notices on his book rentals, login links for medical records after doc visits, etc. I was tempted for awhile to put together a scrapbook of some of the more interesting messages to mail to his parents. Occasionally I will notify a more sensitive sender, e.g. doctor, but have given up on getting him to be more careful or ever change any of the existing accounts.

I also get an array of notices to what I imagine is a late middle age woman in the Midwest. She apparently enters my address believing it is her husbands for important accounts. I get service notices on their cars, billing notices and other account info for her Talbots card, etc. Have tried to contact this couple as well with no luck. I’ve even responded to a couple of non-list senders and asked them to pass on the message for me.

Over the years, I’ve grown less annoyed and more curious about the people causing themselves a privacy nightmare by sending their data to someone with fewer scruples than myself.

Yes, someone created a twitter account in 2013 using my secondary gmail address. Used it for few weeks and posted crap. Got blocked.

I found out only in Dec 2017 when I tried creating a new twitter account. I could reset the password, because I have control over my gmail address. I thought, ban was because email was unverified. So I verified. Even provided a mobile number. Even though, It wouldn't undo the account suspension. I sent support ticket 5+ time, and every time got "Account permanently suspended because of repeated violation of twitter rules".

So unforutnate, ultimately I just created a new gmail/twitter pair.

I don't understand how this situation is a problem, yet Twitter has no issues with millions of bot accounts existing, which would seem easy to identify if you own the service.

I'm on the same boat here. I get everything from appointments to family meetings to banking info. At first I tried to reach back to correct the mistake but it became a pointless task.

It's amazing how many banks and financial/medical institutions don't even bother in confirming email addresses given how sensitive the info they handle is.

Worse yet, when banks don't even try to correct when contacted.

I don't have a common name, just lucky enough to get a preferred gmail account.

Someone, I don't know, signed up to American Express with my email. I'm getting all their AMEX emails.

When AMEX was contacted, they wanted my SSN and "sell me" their identity protection services (as i remember) and didn't care (?) that their member's statements was going to the wrong person.

Somebody signed up for Diner's, of all things, using myname.mywifesname@gmail.com (we use a shared email for utility bills).

I don't even know anyone who has a Diner's card in Italy, or even thought of getting one... It's even less commonly accepted than AmEx and has fewer perks.

This, 1,000 times this. I have gotten access to other folks' accounts who think they're using their email address, but they're actually using my email address. Car loans, job applications, doctor appointments, etc.

Or at least have a "you got the wrong email" link on each email sent. I get this problem too but less so because I have my middle initial included. I tried several times to alert them that the email was wrong but it's always impossible, which is just baffling.

Someone registered their US college grant on my email through Gmail. I tried contacting US embassy. The school. Other US government institutions. No luck nobody responded to my emails. It was some us government site that didn't do email validation. I'll see if I can dig it up

I have the same problem and the same cause. Some institutions were even sending the emails for two different people using the same email address. Which was mine and I was not a client in either of them.

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