Hacker News Reader

Unsubscribe, man, I'm jealous.

Some dude 2,000 miles away from me has bought a Lexus and now I get regular emails about the status of his vehicle, receipts for all work done to it, and reminders of all maintenance not done to it. For a year and counting.

Each email helpfully includes instructions for unsubscribing: First, you log into the Lexus app...

I finally got fed up with it and reported them to abuse@.

Well, since you have the email, you can log in to the Lexus app. Then you could turn off the notifications.

I'm not sure about this but wouldn't that be a felony?

Yes.

99.9% chance no one would care. But people do freak out over this stuff.

Knew one guy that saw that a Bank got hacked on the news. Did an nslookup or similar to check the banks site.

He was arrested the next day and expelled from college for hacking the bank.

Eventually all got cleared up, but screwed up a year of his life

He got expelled for running a DNS query?

Do you mean nmap?

Maybe. Was awhile ago

Yeah, I'd rather not take a 0.1% chance of losing my rights for life over some spam email.

Can you claim you thought it was your account? Then, to demonstrate you knew it wasn’t yours, they’d have to collect various proof, and this demonstration being erratic and risky, they’d probably not attempt a trial.

I can probably claim whatever I want, but given I've never even looked at a Lexus dealership in my life, I doubt I could pull it off.

I'm not sure either, but couldn't you argue that it _is_ your Lexus account? It has _your_ email on it after all. That is the single important identifier attached to the account. The other stuff doesn't matter.

Just create a filter to auto delete them

Perfectly reasonable solution but somehow just unsatisfying.

In the old days, when I ran my own mail server, I used to enjoy rejecting them with custom SMTP 550 messages.

Now I can't do that so I hard to resort to bothering the poor folks at abuse@.

In my defense, they have emailed me from 3 or so different domains/services, so I've had to set up a filter more than once.

> I own a 5 character common first and last name @gmail.com address

Were you a Google employee? Or did you mean something other than how I read this, that your first and last name combined are 5 characters? Because I believe 5-character usernames are not permitted for gmail addresses.

I tried to confirm this and provide a link, but all of support.google.com appears to be non-responsive right now. When it stars working again, this may support my assertion: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/9211434?hl=en

I was an early Gmail SRE so I was able to circumvent the restrictions. It was a bad idea it turns out. For a project I also created "spam@gmail.com" and caused a production outage due to the volume of mail it got forwarded. =)

But yes your right, 6 characters is the minimum of "open" gmail accounts. I know of at least a dozen 2 character accounts created by insiders though.

I am 'pwinnski' nearly everywhere now, because on April 1, 2005, I was not allowed to create a gmail account of only the first five characters. Goodbye to 15 years of the old 5-character username, and hello to what is now 15 years of the new 8-character username!

At the time, I thought about pestering my Google-employee friends, but decided to just suck it up.

Synchronicity: You joined HN June 28, 2016 I joined May 8, 2016

Weird. I wonder if you told me about it back then, or it was a coincidence.

That is such an interesting question; it could be either one IMHO, with equal likelihood

that's a fantastic outage :)

I got a friend that also snatched a 5-letter Gmail account back in the day. He was kind enough to facilitate that I get one to but I got my own domain since forever so didn't get to get one.

> I was an ... SRE ...... I ... caused a production outage

I have nothing to add, except that you made me smile on a Friday afternoon.

Nearly all SRE's have caused an outage of some kind... The trick is to design your systems well enough that even when there is an outage few/no people notice...

Google war story: we used to get digital badges on our employee profiles to indicate useful things like ability to write c++ or python, or having worked on a specific project, etc. I got "porn cookie" for working on the safe search stuff.

Anyway, I designed a badge called "I broke Gmail" that would get applied to anybody that did exactly that. I intended a hint of shame but I got a wall of emails asking to get it with explanations of how each had broken the service at some point.

As the lucky early adopter of gmail I got my last name only @gmail.com. It has been a blessing and a curse.

I have a boilerplate "you have the wrong address" email in multiple languages that I use to reply to the first email from real people. If they persist they then get added to my auto-reply "you have the wrong address" and delete rule.

For automated emails, I don't even bother trying to unsubscribe. They all get added to the delete blacklist rule.

Some of the more fun mistakes I have gotten have been multiple years worth of tax documents from New South Wales, Wine Tastings in South Africa, Church Choir concerts in Germany, and resumes for a receptionist in Colorado at a Gym.

I have a similar address and get a lot of similar email.

My personal favorite was a contract offer to play for a minor league baseball team in the Midwest a few summers back.

I also once got hired by the National Park Service for what sounded like a nice gig as a park ranger.

Ohh yea I forgot that I got mailed a bunch of movie pass financial details while they were still a hot property! That was.. erm.. eye opening.

Likewise -- I fall firmly into this XKCD https://xkcd.com/1279/

My e-doppelgängers have priced cars across the state of Ohio, been active in the PTA, pursued higher education in Germany, and seems to always be interested in commercial real estate in the outer boroughs of NYC.

Though once -- I received an email asking me to please just apologize to my sister already.

I replied, "I think you have the wrong email address; I don't have a sister."

I saw a response -- "HOW COULD YOU SAY THAT? Your mother is crying." I thought it best to just walk away at that point.

Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beb8zCGMsbI

Never thought it'd happen to me, having come across this topic before, but I'm happy to say I can join this club.

It's the same guy, who works in a Eastern European country, where I emigrated from.

The first instance, he was asking his supervisor to use his vacation time so he and family could make a trip to Mecca for Hajj. I chuckled and ignored it.

Second time random picture of some massive metal parts from what looked like some factory he works at.

Third time was this year, very recently and I received a pretty unnecessarily detailed email about how he had to turn back home because he had soiled himself while driving to work... That one made me worry he had gotten Covid.

I guess I'm this guy's boss now.

That poor councilman…

Try having a 3 char username (@gmail), it never ends.

almost positive 6 is the minimum character length for gmail addresses.

almost positive 5 + 5 > 6

nono.. its a single word that is common as a first and last name. There are a BUNCH of cases where its applicable! =)

But yea, 5 characters. I was an early gmail SRE so I was able to circumvent the restrictions. =)

Was it <gecka@gmail.com> ?

No.. but iirc I made that one at one point before abandoning it.

See my comment above.. It is, I was a Gmail SRE that could circumvent the restrictions on that. =)