Comment by vit05 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vit05 | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

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