Comment by necovek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by necovek | Hacker News Reader

I've got a personal email server and an old gmail address from gmail-beta days.

I've never used gmail itself (that model doesn't fit my mind), but O do use that Google account for some minor stuff. Unfortunazely, I've repeatedly gotten email targetted at someone else having same first name initial and same last name on gmail (address is in the form of FLastname@gmail.com). I've usually been able to get through to those people to stop them and to get them to reach their targets, but in the last 24 months, a lady from Michigan is repeatedly giving out my email address for everything (I've got covid appts, doctor appts, movie tickets, responses to home buying inquires...). I have no idea how to stop this: this would've never happened with any provider that's not owning like 60% of the market.

I am constantly annoyed and I've considered both stopping mail forwarding from this account to mine (but then I might miss that YT premium notification) and I've tried reaching out to many humans on the other side. But I've so far resisted the urge to cancel those movie tickets or vaccination appts, but things just keep coming in.

I can't imagine how are people not overwhelmed by wrongly targetted email: there's more of it than spam I get on my personal server, so spam filtering would definitely not move me towards gmail. And actual spam also gets through on gmail!

I have a very short gmail address from the beta days and get probably 5-10 emails a day addressed to accounts that absolutely aren’t mine, Eg my username then a dot and another word, or my username spelled differently. I don’t know why google thought fuzzy-matching emails was a smart idea, but it really isn’t. I’ve gotten a lot of very private information and direct login links to a lot of stuff. I also get countless people putting my email address as theirs, to the point where I’ve given up trying to fix it and just delete it instantly.

To even use that gmail address I need to basically whitelist senders and filter them into folders and ignore the inbox completely.

Gmail, like so many of Googles services these days, is an absolute mess. Features no one asked for, blatant spam that gets through their checks while your actual emails go to the spam folder, and a constantly degrading UI that seems to be an experiment in how much you can annoy the user.

What you've described is common among many first adopters. I know someone who has a common first name and last name combo, signed up for gmail in mid-2000s and use the firstname+lastname@gmail.com.

He got many "weird" messages over the years from messages addressed to a religious minister, to a pro-gun individual and to NSFW account that he didn't sign up for.

I also get an endless amount of email for a few different people with the same name as me at my Gmail from 2005. I used to try to deal with it but now it's just amusing, especially the photos, family chain emails etc. My name alike is Canadian so it's a little glimpse across the border

I don’t think you can stop it. I have to imagine that this woman doesn’t have an email address and just gives out what she thought was a fake one, since so many things require it. Otherwise, how could she not notice she never receives anything?

> Otherwise, how could she not notice she never receives anything?

She may be getting it at f.lastname@gmail.com.

I signed up for Gmail the first or second day it came out with first.last@gmail.com, but hardly ever log(ged) in over the years. A little while ago I did go into it and noticed getting a bunch of message to firstlast@gmail.com.

Now Gmail allows for 'customized' addresses in that you can drop a period anywhere and it will still go to your address. But this raised the risk of one person signing up with first.last and another person signing up with firstlast. Supposedly this is prevented, but I think that they did not catch this situation in the early days of the service, and so a bunch of OG accounts have cross-contamination.

Yeah that dot thing is weird with gmail. Could very well be the reason. Good luck reaching a human to fix it though!

Someone signed up for an Amex card using my wife's gmail address. This was years ago, and she still gets the Amex emails regularly (like, between daily and weekly). It's incredible both that the Amex customer doesn't notice, and also that Amex has absolutely no method whatsoever for a non-customer to contact them and fix the problem.

Somebody signed up with PayPal using my gmail but I can’t reclaim it without providing sign up info. It works the reverse too.

>Unfortunazely, I've repeatedly gotten email targetted at someone else having same first name initial and same last name on gmail (address is in the form of FLastname@gmail.com).

That's a user problem, not a technical one. (there is, of course, an XKCD for that).

I've got a popular initials/surname combo and I have a number of doppelgängers giving it out. The one I feel most sorry for is the trumpist and his scary NRA/pro-gun mail. It's really fierce stuff, I'm glad it's going into my spam folder rather than in front of a real human!

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