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Comment by jameslk | Hacker News Reader

I have one of these accounts (it's a dictionary word), and I can confirm everything the author has said is true. I receive constant onboarding emails I can't opt out of, "so and so thinks you're cute" dating profile notifications, weekly account recovery notifications, all kinds of random crap that was meant for someone else but due to slight misspellings come to me, such as important contracts from lawyers, endless spam and newsletters I will never be able to escape. I've long given up trying to help others deal with mistakenly using my email. It sucks massively and has made my email unusable. Had I known this when I registered my email, I probably would have thought twice about being cute and registering it. These days, I mostly use my own domain for email and carry on.

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Sorry to hear that. As a fellow 'OG' gmail user, I feel your pain, but between the constant 2-3 daily unsubscribe hits and many many Gmail filters it is actually manageable and usable.

Google's "targeted-journalist-level" Advanced Protection Program means I don't have to worry about password resets or account recovery stuff on the account.

Though I have lost track of the number of services I didn't have immediate access to since someone signed up using my email address, and reclaiming it can be a battle sometimes. The Apple ID was interesting - but luckily everyone's "first pet's name" was "Fido"... (Seriously... Please validate your emails everyone!!!)

Often, whenever a real mailing address is included I print out the email and send it in a real letter with a friendly (if just a tad passive-aggressive) note inside. But overall I try to do the right thing for important documents and correspondence.

I do shudder to think how many random accounts are just an email-password-reset away from having access though...

I don't have the same degree of problems with first initial + family name @ gmail (with an uncommon family name), but I've had someone use it for something related to car insurance (which has resulted in a _ton_ of spam), to enter a university run, and had company internal documents forwarded to me (turns out the CEO shares my name).

I have name.wifename@gmail.com and I have not gotten many subscriptions but I got quite a few random emails meant for other people.

I did get a subscription for a Diners credit card, and I am torn about contacting the guy; I don't look at the emails but I probably could find the owner relatively easily. I contacted Diners and they didn't believe me. (Who the heck is using Diners these days?)

> Google's "targeted-journalist-level" Advanced Protection Program

Thanks, I never heard of that before. https://landing.google.com/advancedprotection/

I got on Google's APP a while ago. Google is great for this specific purpose - if there's one thing you can count on Google for, it's never ever listening to their customers, no matter what.

My wife and I have "OG" name based gmail addresses. We only get about 5 emails a week not to us nowadays, but we have also given up trying to route the stuff to people. Somehow we've made it onto government distro lists, business travel itinerary lists and the normal distros.

The worst was when my wife began receiving outage alerts from a Fortune 100 company's NOC. Not just simple Nagios alerts, but detailed technical information accompanying the alert. When we attempted to notify their security team they threatened us for having "hacked" their system. Turns out they realized a former employee added their personal address to the distro when they left so they could help with the transition.

I've got [first initial][last initial]@[my email provider] and have come to find much of the mail I receive seems to be addressed to people with the same initials as myself. It's incredibly frustrating to find the same culprits over and over again. Do they not know their own email address? Or do they just not care? (I suspect the latter)

Yeah me too, facebook is the worst!

Then there was the mother who signed me up to get email when her kids didn't show up at school ....

Then again I used to have a fax phone number one off from a pharmacy, other people's prescriptions every week

Indeed. Mine is firstnamelastname, and I've gotten many emails I shouldn't. The worst was an excel spreadsheet with login details for several dozen midlevel managers at a small banking chain.

Yeah, I have the same type of email, and I received legal and medical documents, letters from schools about students, tons of personal notes, and daily signups for services.

Its crazy.

OMG some guy has signed me up for EVERYTHING from Home Depot to every dating site, to porn sites to cheating sites. It's absurd. I get daily emails from these services still even with unsubscribes and blocks. They're insessant.

> I get daily emails from these services still even with unsubscribes and blocks. They're insessant.

Linkedin is criminal in this department.

One time where “criminal” may actually not be an exaggeration.

I had to set up a filter to automatically reject anything from any of their domains, they're an absolute plague that Moses would be proud of.

I don't really like email alerts for social media as a concept anyway, if I want to hear what LinkedIn has to say I'll look at LinkedIn itself, it has no business injecting itself into the rest of my life via out-of-band methods like email.

Perhaps he used http://mailbait.info/

I abandoned my very short @yahoo.com address in the late 90s due to this. Maybe 1 out of 200 emails I received were actually for me.

I have a four-letter Yahoo account from the 1990s. I have never used the address anywhere. It gets lots and lots of spam.

Same. People signing up for various services, apparently not understanding that they will never be able to read anything sent to this email address.

I get emails from middle schools, online shopping of course, but also emails for at least a couple Trump supporters (not trying to profile; simply getting Trump campaign's constant barrage of emails demanding more money; nothing from Joe's side yet)

What I find particularly annoying is when parents use this account to register for a kid's school alerts. All sort of important stuff like "Do not send your kid to school this week!" or "Where did your kid go?" and because the school itself is also not super savvy, there is nowhere for me to send a reply saying "You need to fix this!"

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