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My main email address is <myreallastname>@gmail.com. My surname is not a very common one, yet I still experience many of the side effects described here. I've had this account since the first day Gmail was available to the public, April 1st 2004—I was invited by a friend who worked for Google at the time.

Back then, I never considered this address an "OG" address, but then around 2012 I noticed something funny. I volunteered to do some charity work and everyone was asked to sign in to a log book and write down their email address with a pen. Several people who worked for this charity said to me "How did you get that email address?" and seemed to think it was unusual that I had a Gmail address that was simply my last name. When I asked them what their email address was, they'd say something like "fluffybunny32428@hotmail.com" or something like that. Hard to believe people use those kinds of addresses for official business and applying for jobs, but they do.

My name is also very English. So when I get missent email, almost everybody using my address is from the UK, Canada, Australia, or NZ.

Most people with average computer literacy has no choice but to use the fluffybunny32428 style email addresses.

To get a good email address these days you either have to be very early at jumping on a new email service or you have to be skilled enough to use your own domain.

Most 'FluffyBunny...' style addresses and usernames I see tend to end in a 2 digit number which is obviously the user's birth year, which they added when told that plain old 'FluffyBunny' wasn't available.

Not a very sensible idea, given how many sites have "What year where you born?" as one of their security questions.

>"What year where you born?"

Anecdata from me: I've never seen this as a security question,

I'm willing to concede that I didn't notice it because I just pick a security question at random and record it in my password database with a made up answer so that I can satisfy their test later on without using a real, guessable answer.

This is exactly what I do too.

I've mentioned before on here; it did come back to bite me once when I had to ring my insurance company and confirm that my mother's maiden name was... er... "Hitler"!

I personally think those sorts of "security" questions are stupid and I have a standard answer to all of the security questions so I don't have to remember what I put.

I have a firstname.lastname Gmail account. Neither frst or last are particularly common. There are various people around the planet who hand out my address as there own, I get invoices on a regular basis but also correspondence from real estate agents and legal correspondence. Most recently I spam listed a Canadian telco because some gentleman in Canada is joyfully handing out my address. On the other hand I very rarely get someone else's snail mail and if I do it is for a neighbour I know a house or two away and never someone in another country :-)

I get loads of invoices, too, from all over the Commonwealth. The more I think about it, the more I suspect the author is right: there are a lot of people out there who think you can just type someone's last name into webmail and it's just going to magically go to the person they intended.

Well that is how Gmail works if it finds a contact in your address book... type the name and it autocompletes. You could be on the receiving end of autocomplete failures that go unnoticed by the sender.

I considered that, but then I checked and saw that almost all of them are coming from other domains, and often non-webmail domains. Of course, whatever email management software or app they're using on their end could be doing that, too.

I use exclusively custom domain emails but use Gmail to manage all of them.

It can also be that instead of people giving your Gmail address as their own, the receiver ignores the domain and just assumes that it's @gmail.com. I've had that happen a couple times.

People also get very confused about + in addresses.

Yes, i have people sending me emails at first.last.com@gmail.com, instead of first@last.com. How I know? They type both addresses just to be sure.

"." is a ghost character for gmail.

firstname.lastname (at) gmail and firstnamelastname (at) gmail

are the same address.

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150?hl=en

Not quite as I learned, for connected services. If you registered originally as johndoe@gmail.com and use john.doe@gmail.com it works fine for mail. For Log-in-with-Google, it goes back to johndoe@gmail.com and many websites treat that as a distinct account. Now you end up with two distinct accounts on the "same" gmail. Not great.

I have the same format for my gmail account, with a second that has a middle initial, and neither account ever really gets that sort of traffic.

Literally the only time I've gotten something that was for another person is when someone else with my exact name purchased something medical and they emailed the receipt to "firstnamelastname@gmail.com". It turns out that if gmail receives an email in that format and all they find is "firstname.lastname@gmail.com", they'll go ahead and stuff it into that inbox.

I was able to track the person down, call them, explain what happened, forward the email to them, and delete it.

My name isn't super uncommon, but for whatever reason I don't get those sorts of emails.

I too have lastname @ gmail, and I find that many people with the same surname as me, and who have firstname.lastname @gmail don't know the difference between a period and a space in an email address.

Same here. Unfortunately my distant cousins of more advanced age, and my mother, and even my brothers (all of whom have emails only one character off from my own) sometimes mistype. I suspect some groups incorrectly transcribe signups from paper forms as well.

I occasionally try to remedy the issues, but I have yet to convince my mother to fix the email on her bank account.

I feel left out!

One of my Gmail addresses is <my first name>@gmail.com and I never get interesting titbits intended for other people.

Mind you, it probably helps that my first name and surname are pretty unusual. I've also got <my first name>@yandex.com, <my surname>@yandex.com, plus the <my first name>.net and <my surname>.net domain names. So I've pretty much cornered the market in being uniquely identifiable online, for anyone who knows me.

Hmmm... maybe I should se if <my surname>@gmail.com is available, just to really tie up the loose ends!

UPDATE: Hmmm... <my surname>@gmail.com has already been taken, so I can't complete the set. Chances are I actually set it up myself a long while back and then never bothered to use it, but I'm buggered if I can remember the password.

I have {Hacker News Username} back when Gmail started. Consequently I get a lot of emails in Japanese and airline travel itineraries. I had to add an extra U on the end to meet the six character minimum.(Technically it's Washū in Hepburn, but uu is accepted.) I also get a bunch of Washington State University junk.

I am switching from my legacy demon email and I was surprised I managed to get my lastname.org.co.uk domain.

I have two such gmail accounts! I got one early on—around 2005 or 2006 which receives a gross ton of spam, so eventually replaced it with one that uses my initials and then my last name which is way less trouble. I got my brother on board around the same time. He just uses our last name at gmail. I'm sure he gets his share of crap.

> Hard to believe people use those kinds of addresses for official business and applying for jobs, but they do.

A couple of years back, a friend was doing some recruiting. One of the applicants had the email address givesdamngreathead@hotmail.com.

(Translated, it was in another language.)

I'm lucky. I have <firstname>.<lastname>@gmail.com, I haven't had a single case of misuse.

On the other hand, it appears my name is unique in the world. The only things I've ever found under my name that weren't written by me appear to be people scraping for content and trashing the format--I've found plenty of examples of words attributed to me that were really quotes.

Yup, I feel your pain. One of my emails is <onechar>@<3chars>.com. This fails verification on so many websites it's just comical. I then figured on making a <6chars>@<3chars>.com. Turns out folks mostly validate <3chars>.com in my experience, which I assume is because of good old mail.com. It's frustrating.

> Turns out folks mostly validate <3chars>.com in my experience, which I assume is because of good old mail.com.

I wonder what happens with .co.uk, and other two-letter second-level domains.

Probably hard coded exceptions.

My student email was @tcd.ie - I had plenty of websites I wasn't able to sign up to, offers I couldn't redeem and mail that just never arrived...

My email address is *@example.tld

Fails a lot of validations because ‘example’ can’t possible by right eh?!

Some second level example addresses are actually reserved and not for use. See rfc 2606.

This one actually almost makes sense because of RFC 2606 [1]. It reserves the .example TLD as well as example.com, example.org, and example.net as only example domains that cannot/should not be used. Back when .com/.net/.org were "the only TLDs that matter" a blanket check for example in the second level made some sense, and/or to just assume that RFC 2606 would apply to future TLDs (despite it being quite specific in which domains it reserved).

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2606

I gave up using mail@<nickname>.network because of the significant percentage of sites that refuse the .network TLD.

One large financial services provider even told me that their "policy" was to allow 3, 4, or 5 characters as the last part of the domain. So .ninja is A-OK. I pointed out how ludicrous this was, and they told me it was their "policy" again, and that's why Australian Super doesn't have any of my money.

> their "policy" was to allow 3, 4, or 5 characters as the last part of the domain

Wow, no country codes? I could understand a restriction dating from before the great expansion of TLDs, but expect it to have a 2 in it.

Ah, apologies. My mistake, yes, 2 digits was fine.

Actually I wonder then if it was 2, 3, or 4. I think it was, because I remember thinking that .wiki would have been okay.

Either way. Arbitrary and stupid.

I would bet on a number of sites this is because they all copied and pasted the same email validation regrex they found online when googling, which was made before TLDs could be that long, and they don't know how to fix it.

There's probably a "misconceptions people have about e-mail addresses" post out there somewhere; the tl;dr is that so much is or will be allowed, for validation you should really only check if there's an @ in the address, for the rest just try to send an email and see if it bounces.

But don't activate an account without e-mail verification. I got a random account on Deezer because someone signed up with my e-mail address; they probably got it off a spam list. But it kind of implies that Deezer didn't do e-mail verification before letting people use their platform.

I've had problems with sites accepting my .is email address too, probably due to similar logic.

I have something similar when I used contact@<firstname>.<lastname>.name

There were various ways in which that failed.

1. ".name" was pretty new by then, so some frontends did not accept it

2. some frontends objected to the third level of my domain part, accepting third levels only in such cases as the well know. ".co.uk" for example

3. some frontends let me sign up, but something in the backend failed, I can only suspect if it was the ".name" tld or my third level, but I never got any mails after signing up

The number of sites that send mail to "foo@bar.com" when you give them "foo@sub.bar.com" is staggering, too. It's a mystery to me why they would ever want to do that, but it happens a lot.

I can see how that happens immediatly...

    var domain = addr.split(['@','.']).take_last(2)
    var tld = domain[1]
    // check TLD against wacky rules...

See, boss, it's easy. What's next?

It's also possibly just some arcane regex incantation that someone implemented 12 years ago and nobody has been able to decipher it since.

> 2. some frontends objected to the third level of my domain part, accepting third levels only in such cases as the well know. ".co.uk" for example

This is actually not such a rare edge case. My university, for example, uses <name>@students.<university>.de . So there's really not much excuse for not handling this.

Similar experience with IDN domains. Most places altogether reject them, but those which accept them, only a subset accept IDN recipient in the mail address.

The SMTPUTF8 RFC to support non-ASCII local parts is from February 2012 and thus fairly new [1]. Postfix supports it since July 2014 [2] and to the best of my knowledge Dovecot still does not yet support SMTPUTF8 for LMTP.

Personally I did not enable SMTPUTF8 support in my Postfix due to the lack of Dovecot support.

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6531 [2] http://www.postfix.org/SMTPUTF8_README.html

You could probably put a +. Instead of c@cik.com, it could be c+hn@cik.com or c+jobs@cik.com. These would still forward it to c@cik.com [0]

This has the side effect of knowing who has been selling out your email to spammers.

[0] https://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~watrous/plus-signs-in-email-addr...

I mean I legit wish I owned cik.com, that'd be awesome :p. Seriously though tonnes of folks fail the +. You know what's especially awesome? Ever try shot non-UTF8 domains. Those are fun.

I was once directed to appear at a Las Vegas hotel lobby at 7 AM sharp. I was to drive various poker celebrities from shoot to shoot around the city for a movie. Included was a detailed itinerary. I recognized the names from various TV poker shows.

I wonder what happened when I didn't show up (I did let them know that I wouldn't be there), and I wonder if it was ever finished and released.

Yes, I also get the bills (mostly from electricians in Australia for some reason) the porn/game signups, the notes from Grampa, etc.

I happened to be online the moment outlook.com launched and registered a <very popular first name (it's even the name of a disciple and/or one of The Beatles)>@outlook.com email address and walked away from it exactly because of this.

Over a decade ago, I was added to a Sri Lanken family tree thing on Ancestry - because they invited my email address, as we have the same last name (my last name though is Norwegian, and the same as this sri lanken family.

I still get updates in my email from this family and even had bank statement updates sent to me. and birthday wishes mean for the other sstave...

I have told them multiple times - but I am still on their family tree - for a DECADE

Of course they won't let you go, your family now!

I have Firstname.Lastname@gmail but I never get any mistaken mail there.

Now text messages on the other hand... I get all sorts, at one point I was getting some for a Black Gun group. Now I am getting them from the DNC but they are address to the wrong name.

The scarier thing is two factor authorization text messages, I remember getting some for Facebook and Instagram. I never did anything with them but if not set up right I suppose I could get into someone else's account.

I love getting unknown sender random texts. I play a game with myself to see how long I can keep them responding.

One time I got a wrong number and over the next few days coached a lady who was calling her friend for advice on her upcoming job interview, as she wasnt sure she wanted to make that career change.

I did the best I could to advise on the matter (sincerely) - but I never got a reply on the matter.

I always delete the message immediately after so the thread isnt there so I have no way of initiating a connection.

Since we're all reminiscing...

I was once the (proud) owner of `ozzy@ibm.net` at some point in the mid-late nighties.

I was living in Istanbul for awhile and IBM had just entered the market to bring us all Internet, and decided to use their `ibm.net` domain to give all their customers free email.

Still miss that one xD

Hah - not as bad but similar, but hey it’s my name-ish. I get a fairly high amount of password reset attempts on it too. (guess my Gmail address, I got gmail back when it was invite only beta)

Really like your approach at work though, I am apparently signed up to so many various services that I have never heard of, and could probably access lots of PII if I wanted to.

I also have one of these email addresses, and have been accused of stealing it by some so-and-so who doesn't know what they're email actually is.

I unsubscribe and/or report spam where I can, but on a typical day, I still get around 3 emails intended for someone else.

My email account got 'hacked' by the Chinese (not really hacked, just reused the same password). From there they broke into multiple other accounts by password recovery. I got control of the account back. But few years later, someone used my email to register at some Singaporean university. Since then I keep receiving emails from multiple departments telling me about exams and my lack of attendance.

I have <name><number>@gmail.com. Despite the number, I still get emails about other people’s bank accounts, parcels being shipped to them, the occasional missent scan…

yep, I'm "cweekly" at most places and get a lot of this; there's rarely any recourse even if I had the time to try and resolve em