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Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

Oh man. The infinite loops of impossible verification by large companies that should know better are massive pain peeve of mine.

This goes right to the top for me, along the ubiquitous "please verify your account" emails with NO OPTION to click "that's NOT me, somebody misused my email". Either people who do this for a living have no clue how to do their job, or, depressingly more likely, their goals are just completely misaligned to mine as a consumer and it's all about "removing friction" (for them).

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Oh man we had a person leave unexpectedly who controls our Apple organization for our dev accounts. I'm several months into me making requests, getting responses at least a week later for each email where the responder ... didn't really read my message. Then they ask for documents ... but they forgot to send me the secure link ... another week+ for them to do what they said they were going to do. Now one of my documents didn't include a sentence they needed ...

One of the requests was for a business card ... I haven't had a business card made with my name on it in 20 years.

The amazing thing is that I bet scammers working this system can get through this faster than I can.

At this point they should just give me control because no way would some scammer fail this much at this ungodly process.

Scammers can definitely get through it faster than you can. Whenever you attempt to address abuse in a system by increasing the complexity of that system, you implicitly bias it towards those with the time and inclination to study it, which always includes those with intent to abuse it, and generally does not include your users.

I'm in a similar boat...and over the weeks where i have been sending the requested docs/files...Apple reps come back and state that one of docs i sent them was not valid...so i ask them to clarify their "definition" of the doc..and they just either reply with unhelpful comments, or delay a little and delay things further. When someone asks for a copy of a payslip and you send it...but then Apple says its not a payslip, i genuinely am sad about the overall state of the world...I dislike apple and all these big tech providers for their abusive control/power and at the same time vast layers and levels of incompetence. :-(

I’ve been shocked by the poor support.

I didn’t expect speed but what I’ve experienced has been what feels like bottom of the barrel outsourced support you get from some no name brand company….

Structurally all these companies have adopted the approach that the anti-fraud team is it's own world, that should be uninfluenced. So you can't talk to them on the phone, even customer support can only email them; the only feedback paths are ones under their own control. It also seems likely that each subsequent reply is processed by a different operative; for companies of sufficient size, that's probably enforced programmatically.

This all helps make them immune from manipulation by "social engineering" or other forms of influence. But of course it also means they have virtually zero incentive to give a shit about the customer.

There are obviously many ways that they could improve customer experience, but giving them an incentive to do so, without opening the door to influence, is a hard problem.

Personally I think it should be the law that you can put up a bond to get to accelerate the process. Unfortunately the amount potentially at risk is probably larger than some customers accounts, at least at places like AWS where their services can trivially be exchanged for cash. So in many cases a bond would be over the customers means. But if any customers can afford it, it would provide a feedback path.

> Oh man. The infinite loops of impossible verification by large companies that should know better are massive pain peeve of mine.

I got hit by this from google.

1. Gmail added requirement for 2FA on my primary email address. Since I had no phone number on file, it instead used my recovery email address. Thankfully, I still had the password for my recovery email address, and could continue to (2).

2. Gmail added requirement for 2FA on my recovery email address. Since I had no phone number on file, it instead used by recovery's recovery email address. Thankfully, I still had the password for my recovery's recovery email address, and could continue to (3).

3. SBC Communications no longer exists, as it merged with AT&T in 2005. Email addresses at `sbcglobal.net` were maintained up until around 2021-ish, when they started purging any mailboxes that had been idle for more than 12 months.

Fundamentally, this was google's fault for misusing a recovery email for 2FA. Unfortunately, the only way to fix it would be to contact AT&T, asking them to pretty please update the email settings for somebody who hadn't been a paying customer for two decades.

> Fundamentally, this was google's fault

Or yours, for not caring about 2FA. It's been a common practice for many years, and strongly recommended by most identity services, as well as OWASP and NIST recommendations.

What would you do in Google's place?

Not add 2fa automatically, but instead prompt with options to add it.

This probably doesn't comply with the relevant recommendations, but cutting a user of from their email is worse in my opinion.

I'm sure Google prompted author for years begging to turn the 2FA on, as well as warning that they will enforce it on day X. Author ignored them all.

That doesn't make forcing it any less wrong.

Why is 2FA so critical it’s worth proactively breaking the user? What’s the even more bad thing that would (not could) happen to the user if 2FA was not enabled?

Password database leaks turning into spam/proxy farms of very well aged accounts.

That’s a could.

I have the same issue. At the time I created the account that I'm locked out of, Google said nothing about these "recovery" email addresses as 2FA. Years passed without any notice that maybe they were going to lock me out of an account I have the password for. No notice that I had better have access to that "recovery" email address that I hadn't bothered to keep up to date because I never thought I'd need to "recover" the account from Google. (In my case, it's an old .edu email address that I was promised "for life".)

If Google wanted to lock me out of my account for my own good until I enabled 2FA, fine. But as GP stated, they abused the recovery email addresses to force 2FA on people and ended up locking some people out of their accounts.

> No notice that I had better have access to that "recovery" email address that I hadn't bothered to keep up to date

The rest of your complaints make sense but this one is bizarre. It's a recovery email, isn't having access to it the entire point? Like what else did you think it was supposed to be there for beside being accessible?

Google clearly misused it for something else, and you have a strong argument they shouldn't have. This one sentence just needlessly weakens the argument.

The point is that an or relationship was silently converted into an and relationship, which is a _very_ different relationship between two factors.

I never expected to need to recover the account because I used a strong password stored in a password manager that I had adequately secured and backed up.

Exactly.

It was pretty sobering when Google demonstrated to me a new and novel way that made them the actual threat to my account security. I thought that by carefully refusing to publish anything with their add-ons (YouTube, Docs, Android Store, etc, etc) that I'd avoid getting swept up in an autoomated account-wide bannination, but, nope. A perfectly ordinary login to the account I'd had for years from the exact same location and IP address I'd used the day before was "suspicious" and required "recovery".

> old .edu email address that I was promised "for life"

Best treat all org controlled email address as temporary.

Not force nonconsensual authentication methods onto users.

Google is one of the rare places I actually see positive value to 2FA. Compare with say banks, where it being demanded actually decreases my security. But regardless, it should not be forced.

But then millions of users would stay unprotected from password sealing (see https://haveibeenpwned.com/).

They certainly did a proper thing forcing people to use 2FA AFTER multiple emails over the years recommending to turn it on, and warning that they will enforce it, which they did.

As for the banks I doubt it decreases security. Even SMS 2FA actually reduces fraud by 90%+ percent.

Yes, some banks implement it silly, like SVB requiring biometric login in order to scan one-time QR 2FA code from their app (biometric login is less secure), but you don't have to use the QR code, can use regular 2FA without biometrics.

But even then having 2FA is 42 times better than not having it.

For US banks, the most important thing you can do to prevent fraud is to check your account transactions every 30 days so that you can report fraudulent transactions in a timely manner and have them reversed. Anything that increases friction of logging into your account thus decreases your security.

nonsense. any feature should have acceptable failure modes. blaming the customer for a fault they have no control over is not acceptable. many people know nothing about 2FA. it is not their responsibility. 2FA is a symptom of shitty designed systems which are inherently insecure and companies who dont give a shit about that and let their customers shoulder the burden by shoving complexity down their throats.

if you make an app it is not your customers responsibility to secure it with additional actions from their side..if it is, you need to make it mandatory and guide them step by step.

you cant after a while enable some toggle.and tell people to fuck off and its the fault of their ignorance to not know some technical details.

most consumers of these services dont know shit about IT and they should not be burdened with it..any product that demands it is either only meant for tech savy people or more likely lazily and badly engineered by money hungry people who see opportunity to make more money in user's issues.

> many people know nothing about 2FA

That's why Google sent them multiple emails explaining what it is and recommending to turn it on. What else could Google do?

Not just turn it on without their approval.

Provide a way to resolve the issue in the very foreseeable situation where someone doesn't read the emails an add it.

Is it possible that you use email differently than most people? I virtually never actually check my inbox. I'm either reading an email that I knew was coming (e.g. an order confirmation with a shipping link) or I'm searching for something specific. So no matter how many emails Google sends I'm unlikely to read them.

2FA falls under the same criteria as mandatory password rotation, and "has to have special characters". Those were NIST recommended for a long time too.

Google made it very clear years ago that they shouldn't be trusted with anything irreplaceable/that would cause major problems if you lost access.

Once it became clear that they'd shifted from "crappy customer service" to (IMNSHO) "we fetishize the complete absence of customer service" it became dangerous to depend on them. Really, what's the worst that could happen? Maybe someone spams emojis in live chat on a game livestream at the request of the streamer on a personal account, it gets banned for abuse, Google recognizes that it's linked to other services and locks down everything? But that's so unrealistic I'm sure it could never happen.

It's not like they also have the ability to identify links between multiple accounts accessed by the same person and have automated processes that might stomp the associated accounts as well. Why, that would probably require something like allowing poorly-understood automated agents to take actions on their own!

> Fundamentally, this was google's fault for misusing a recovery email for 2FA.

While this would absolutely suck and I sympathise with anyone getting hit by this out of the blue, it's pretty clearly your fault, not Google's. What should they have done? Just permit everyone to avoid upgrading to 2FA indefinitely? That would result in relatively more account hacks overall, for which they would inevitably be roasted in the court of public opinion.

I'm tired of 2FA. Absolutely the worst when setting up a new phone after losing the old one. A whole bunch of mixed methods, in 2 hours between installing all the apps again, getting text messages, installing authenticators, scanning IDs, taking selfies, receiving phone calls with spoken codes, grabbing another device that still somehow has access, twenty emails about new suspicious activity, grabbing recovery codes, or scrambling to find the Yubikey I used when registering for the simplest and most benign services that have no connections to my personal data or payment.

Google will insist on sending a notification to a phone you have no longer access to, and regaining access always feels like hacking yourself. I dread the day I lose a phone together with my SIM card and ID during travel. I will never be able to go back and will have to start a new life as an illegal immigrant, living as a hermit in some deep forest.

2FA isn't an upgrade, it's an annoyance. If your organization needs secure authentication, it's useful, but as an individual I have only ever been enraged. Making me check my email and phone to log in is a great way to ensure I never use your service again.

> What should they have done? Just permit everyone to avoid upgrading to 2FA indefinitely?

Yes. I've had online accounts for nearly as long as there's been an "online". The only time I've ever lost control of an account was due to 2FA.

2FA should always be optional for one's personal accounts. [0] People who can securely manage passwords simply don't need it. And if Organized Crime or Mossad wants access to my accounts, 2FA is not going to stop them.

[0] Corporate accounts and hardware are a different matter. You manage those however your employer commands you to manage them.

Personally, if their 2FA doesn't work, then they should definitely permit everyone to avoid upgrading to 2FA indefinitely.

If their 2FA doesn't work, I agree.

I doubt anyone would blame google for not forcibly enabling 2fa.

I think it's similar to, say, serving raw HTTP instead of HTTPS. If, say, Facebook still served HTTP and people were getting their passwords swiped, Meta would be in the crosshairs.

Even though you could say a person getting their 1FA account details phished is technically "their own fault", certainly to a greater extent than my HTTP example, spending the time understanding the issue well enough to realise that it was their own fault and not BigRichCompany's fault is not high on most people's list of fun things to do.

The only reason Google does that 2FA dance is to get your phone number 'cuz it tends to be a very strong persistent marker which is very useful for... advertisement.

I have the same suspicion in general, but isn't it possible to use an authenticator app as the second factor instead of a phone number?

Try to register a new account without a phone number.

Someone constantly adds my Gmail address as their Gmail account's backup address.

I constantly remove it whenever Gmail sends me the notification.

I can't help but think there is some method for the other person to steal my Gmail account if I never remove my email as their backup.

I logged in several times to other people's accounts and reset their passwords. But it's too tiring, people keep adding my email.

I hope it's because I have small simple email and not because they want to steal it.

You’re confessing to several actual felonies here, may want to change strategies.

“…and so I made him the owner of my account, and he used that to remove himself from it!”

“We’ll be right over.”

You forgot the part where he reset their email he didn't own and change their passwords so they couldn't get back into it

I think you’re misreading this. OP has an email account. Someone else signed up for some website that doesn’t verify that you own the address before allowing you to log in and use the service. If the site did verify it, the user wouldn’t have been able to log in because OP would have been getting the verification emails, and not the user.

Later, after OP told the user and they failed to change their address, OP logged into the site and changed their password, putting an end to the spam they were receiving from the user’s actions.

I don’t have an ethical qualm with this. He didn’t want to sign up for the service. Someone else signed his email address up for it. Legally, I can’t imagine that being prosecutable.

One thing I've found, occasionally the hard way, is that helpful bystanders are always offering advice based on "ethical", "intuitive", "logical" and "common sense", usually without any aspect of "legal".

I got divorced a decade ago, and every well-wishing person in my life was strongly urging me to do things which were shockingly counter-productive / dangerous / wrong, based on their confident understanding (assumption, really) of the law which was completely and dangerously inaccurate.

Hacker News audience is global. People start accounts for various purposes. Yet people still freely share the notion that logging in to some unknown website run by an unknown company from a hard to spell country and then touching things is universally safe.

I miss the old "IANAL" tag which at least provided basic warning and self-awareness :-).

IANYL, though! Offering legal advice with the disclaimer “I am not a lawyer” could be prosecuted as practicing law if a reasonably party could still infer a potential lawyer-client relationship from your message and/or intent. Instead, “I am not your lawyer” explicitly denies the lawyer-client relationship, which closes the door on both being accused of practicing law illegally and on being found as party to a lawyer-client relationship whether or not you have the appropriate certifications.

> closes the door on [...] being accused of practicing law illegally

Does it? So I can say, "I'm not your lawyer, but I'm happy to go ahead and give you specific legal advice on your case." and I can't be accused of illegally practicing law? I was under the impression that this could still get you into hot water. But not being your lawyer, due to the fact that I am not a lawyer at all, I don't know if it is true or not.

IANAL, so take this with a grain of salt, but:

As with all things, who are you going to get in trouble with? And what's so magical about legal practice as opposed to, say, giving shitty medical advice or telling someone how to build porch? Asking genuinely. No one falls all over themselves to say "I am not a doctor, but...", even though their next words could kill someone. The implication is that they don't have formal training but they saw something on Facebook that you should try. What happens next is on you, not on them.

> No on falls all over themselves to say “I am not a doctor, but”

This is precisely why I’m pointing this out: IANAL is a very curious case of people self-labeling their statements as “not trustworthy for the topic”. I can think of perhaps no other cases where it is so popular to claim to not be a professional in the relevant field, which suggests that IANAL is a ‘badge of honor’ rather than a proper legal disclaimer. Certainly few (if any) claim IANAD before writing about their experiences with medical issues, body things, or nutritional supplements here, even though those topics are (as you correctly indicate) potentially lethal.

Thus, IANYL: if your goal is to ensure that the recipient of your advice / opinion / whatever does not have grounds to claim that you provided legal advice, and therefore are their lawyer, then you can either do so weakly with TINLA (“this is not legal advice”), which still leaves the door open for awkward claims by some desperate grifter-rando to reach a bench, or you can do so strongly with IANYL (“I am not your lawyer”), which closes that vulnerability in full.

Not once in years of using IANYL have I seen anyone else properly protect themselves from this vulnerability; meanwhile, “IANAL but” remains in use as a badge of honor. So, yeah, I don’t think anyone considers the particular avenue of vulnerability a serious threat, and yeah, the general context of IANAL here is prideful rather than protective. But after twenty years of dealing with a stalker who was adept at internet and tried to fuck with my job at one point, I do now tend to value closing off legal vulnerabilities with certainty, and as a bonus it doesn’t imply insult to the professions of law.

IANYL, YMMV :)

While true, I think that's implicit in all online conversations. I'm certain my thinking is 100% wrong in some jurisdictions elsewhere. Anything I say is wrong somewhere.

"It's OK: you can curse on the Internet." "Not when you're typing from Iran!" "Well, OK, if you're in Iran, don't take this American's advice for dealing with a government."

Part of our obligation as a reader is to consider what others are saying in the context of our own circumstances and experiences before trying to apply it. If you don't, and things end badly, that's on you.

But I stand on my words: I think it's ethically OK. You may not. That's alright. We're not required to have the same ethics or morals. And I don't think that's prosecutable. That's my opinion, based on my circumstances, not a statement of fact that applies in all jurisdictions around the world.

Above all else, I got tired of giving disclaimers about every single thing I say lest someone jump in with a "gotcha! scenario" I hadn't considered because it's not relevant to the context of the discussion.

I'm curious if this would really be considered unlawful access, since only pure idiocy and no hacking/scamming/etc were involved.

It would be in Canada, but our "misuse of computer" charge is overly broad and never been well tested.

On the other hand, in Hong Kong it would be straight to jail. Someone was sent a link by the airlines, he changed a couple of characters and it ended up showing another person’s data. The guy voluntarily reported the vulnerability and all he got was a criminal charge and found guilty

You give someone ownership of something and they used that ownership...

It's like leaving your bike in the street, with no lock. Still theft, but you'd be up for a part of the responsibility.

It's more like leaving your bike in someone else's garage.

No, it's like giving someone a set of keys to your car, and they take it for a drive.

I think it’s more like you registered the car in their name. Now they’re allowed to use it, and also responsible for the thing which they didn’t want.

Consider that the “imposter” starts uploading child porn or something, and it’s on an account registered to your address. I think it’s perfectly A-OK to tell the service that it’s not me using the thing and I want them to close the account someone created in my name.

No harm done no one is gonna prosecute this

In what jurisdiction? He's in Russia

He's in the US.

Right. Techies are always quick to suggest I do something naughty or funny with this "great power" I've unwittingly gained, but in reality it's just a liability. If I ignore it and they do something nasty and implicate me, it's a pain. If I touch it with a 10 ft pole, now I'm even more actively involved.

Just include "not me!" In the verification email, dam it

Have you tried sending them emails asking/telling them to stop?

I’m a different person, but this happens to me, too. I have the kstrauser@yahoo.com email address because I signed up for it like 25 years ago. I log in every 6 months to see what the few other kstrausers in the world have signed me up for.

Not jsmith, but kstrauser. Not Gmail, but Yahoo. And I still get banking docs, and HOA meeting minutes, and birthday party invitations, and Facebook logins, and other bizarre random stuff.

I have so many questions. I’ve typoed my address before and had to correct it. That’s understandable. But to wholly invent one and say, yep, that looks good even though I’ve never used it before, I’m sure it’ll be fine! I just don’t get it.

I had one that person seemed to think their @twitter name was the same thing as my gmail address. Haven't seen it in a while, maybe they figured it out after I told their kid's teacher they had the wrong person...

Yeah I have josephg@gmail. The amount of spam that account gets is wild - about 50-100 emails hit the inbox per day. I got soft-locked out of google docs a few months ago because my google account's 25gb quota was exhausted.

Some of the emails are really unfortunate stuff. "Your account was added as a backup address." - Then inevitably, a few weeks later, dozens of password reset emails. Sorry bud. I've received pay stubs. Orders and invoices. I get phone bills every month for someone in India. Its chaos.

Early on I'd sometimes reply to these random emails telling people they've got the wrong address. The most astonishing reply I ever got was from HSBC bank telling me I needed to come into the branch to change my email address. Over the course of a week, I explained about 3 times that that was impossible. That I live in Australia. That I'm not their customer, and its not my account. Eventually they told me they were disabling online banking on my account. Now I've given up replying at all.

Send emails into that pit of PII misery if you want. I don't read them.

Some of these banks are ridiculous. HDFC bank insists that I send them my photo id, address, phone number, and my Indian id number to prove that I'm not their customer. I tried explaining that I don't have an Indian id number because I don't live in India but they insisted they can't help me unless I provide all of this. Then they sent me legal notices threatening me for not paying "my" bills. I send all their stuff to spam now.

I have a catch-all on a .com.au domain where there exists a later 1000+ people organisation with the equivalent .gov.au. I get what you described but from many, many people - divorce proceedings, legal discussions, financial documents, health things, etc.

I have very weird and rare @gmail.com and I Still get other peoples mail sometimes.

That may be what they're hoping for, using a similar modus operandi as those WhatsApp/IM messages from strangers who text you with things in the vein of ‘Hey, it was great meeting you at the conference’ or ‘Did Martha like your flowers?’ etc.

They may well be looking for targets.

I have a story here: I deleted my Reddit account.

A few months later, the owner of the u/batman account added my mail as password reset mail.

I looked up the account. It was hardly ever used in 15 years, mostly for once in a blue moon dropping in a random comment role-playing as Batman. It was not obviously anyone I knew. It looked like they were basically inviting me to take over the account.

That was actually a bit tempting, but then the owner, whoever they were, would know who I was, and I still didn't know who they were.

(For that reason I've changed the name, it wasn't Batman, but it was equally "I can't believe you got THAT as your Reddit username" rare.)

So I clicked "this wasn't me" instead. After a few weeks the account was deleted by the owner. It seems they were willing to burn a 15+ year old account with a super-desirable (to many) name in order to get me back to Reddit, and then when I refused they just deleted it. That was VERY weird, and I wish I knew what was going on.

yeah this was my thinking, too

great way to phish people without looking like a malicious, obvious actor

instead they look like idiots or rubes and you get a little too curious, and in ways that might be considered malicious (and potentially illegal).

>You write an email that says "Hey, can you please stop using my email address?"

>You send it to johnsmith@gmail.com

>You receive a new message, it says "Hey, can you please stop using my email address?"

>You're johnsmith@gmail.com, you only know that's the address that's being used

PD: I know that if he resets the password he can get the other address, but this scenario was funny in my head.

There are times where you just can't... someone uses my email address in person at tractor supply co. and I'm getting a ton of marketing email I can't usnsub to.

I've had this happen several times... There's a lawyer I used for a dispute a few years ago, and they now have another "First Last" name that matches mine, and he keeps emailing me... my reply, "Wrong Michael, again..."

It's kind of annoying all around... I need to get off my butt and get a few things shifted, then just start relying on my own MTA again, instead of forwarding *@mydomain to my gmail to. I'll still wildcard the domain, but to a single mailbox on my own mta.

I'm not sure how bad the spam might get though... I've had a test account on my mta for a couple years and it hasn't really recived any... my wildcard accounts either... I use the wildcard so I can do things like walmart@mydomain, to see if/where an email address is sold/leaked from regarding spam.

Contact the Bar Association for that lawyer's state. He will definitely stop making that mistake then.

My Gmail account is a funny word in Spanish that I got when there was still plenty of names available.

I get TONS of emails of people trying to join services that use my address as a "fake email".

We call this the Scunthorpe problem. Stupid "rude word" detectors use simple rules that fail on actual words.

Way back I was working on a loyalty card system that had the entire UK electoral roll and Post Office data and we had to validate people; names and addresses. A "comedian" decided to sign themselves up for the system using a stupid name, and when the loyalty card duly arrived at their (correct) address with their (incorrect) name, they went to the papers and it became a slow news day human interest story.

We had to implement a Scunthorpe filter, and that was really difficult. We ended up with a human looking at the data and hitting a button if they thought this was a made-up "funny" name or address.

You would be amazed at English place names and surnames. Velvet Bottom is a real place in the UK. There are many people wandering around with names that you can't say in polite company.

This happens to me several times a month. I'm more concerned about account termination, in that if their Gmail account is terminated for some reason, mine would be as well due to it being the backup email address.

I have an "OG" mac.com account (got it about five minutes after Steve announced it). My wife actually has her first name.

We both get hit with "OG Hell," where people are constantly entering our emails. I think most time, it is accidental (maybe they meant "XXX1234", and forgot the number).

What makes it worse, is that Apple aliases mac.com, icloud.com, and me.com together, and there's no way to turn off one of the aliases.

mac.com is really in retirement. No one sets up new ones, but the miscreants typo icloud.com, which gets routed to me.

I have a rule, where I shitcan every mail to icloud.com, but I wish I could simply turn off the forwarder.

You could try stealing theirs. Surely, one of the forgot-password flows must use the recovery email.

A couple of years ago someone associated my email with their bank account in Santander UK. I tried to get in touch with Santander but turned out that the only way to do so is to either make an international call (I don't live in UK) or send them a paper letter. I gave up and just routed these emails to separate folder.

I meticulously report every single of emails like this as spam. Every single one. If it _could_ be read as a phishing attempt, I report them as phishing.

Etc.

"Wrong recipient" seems beyond the scope of what you can expect a spam filter to handle with accuracy. Wouldn't marking it as spam just degrade the signal to noise ratio of legitimate email? I'd rather get a few misses here and there than have to trawl through my spam folder which I only check once or twice a year when something doesn't show up right away.

I prefer "please verify your account" to "thanks for joining" by a lot. The former presumably does not verify when I ignore it. The latter should be illegal but somehow isn't.

I do wish there was a requirement for some sort of "no" button that would stop sending sign up requests entirely.

Any idea what the incentive is for them to put in an email address they can't access?

I run a few websites that accept an email address (all noncommercial, I have no interest in spamming anyone). One of them is the "contact me" feature on my personal website. To prevent spam, I had people just put in their email address and it'll automatically email them my email address. This works perfectly to this day, haven't got a single spam email on any of the addresses I've handed out, but the ratio of emails sent out to received is probably 50 to 1. Why would anyone put an email address in there if not to contact me? I've been wondering if it's used by mail bombing services, idk if that's a thing but I know of the concept of annoying someone by signing them up for a hundred newsletters. My site doesn't send recurring emails, though, and it doesn't allow putting more than two email addresses per month in, per /24 IPv4 block (and even more strict on v6). It's useless for mail bombing services but the (presumed) bots keep submitting a steady rate of maybe 2 new email addresses per day, each time from a new ISP in a random country. No email addresses is ever submitted twice. No rhyme or reason to it. If anyone can make sense of this, that might help me in stopping the abuse

One way to do phishing attacks is to inject some payload in an automated mailing so malicious content comes from a valid email address. I wonder if they're testing whatever mail entry they can find with addresses they have access to in attempt to find something usable?

> The former presumably does not verify when I ignore it.

That doesn't prevent a huge majority of them from sending you notification emails all the time even if you never verify.

A chronic problem is the idea that if something can't be automated with a human in the loop then it simply can't be done at scale. Technologists will do anything except employ humans to solve social problems.

s/technologists/venture capitalists/

> along the ubiquitous "please verify your account" emails with NO OPTION to click "that's NOT me, somebody misused my email"

What would you expect clicking that "wasn't me" link to do?

In 99% of cases, the user who signed up with your address already can't do any more with that account unless you positively confirm it was you; and the site also won't send you any more email because they don't consider the email verified (and so sending to it might result in their emails getting sent to spam -> their email-sending reputation score going down.) So things are already in the state you'd want them to be in, no?

The only problem I can think of with that state is that now you can't sign up "fresh" for an account with the same provider, because now there's already an account associated with your email address sitting there in their DB in the pending-email-verification state. (But you still can acquire that account, by clicking "forgot/reset password" and going through that flow, which will inevitably go through your email, as anything like a 2FA setup flow always waits behind email verification.)

> and the site also won't send you any more email because they don't consider the email verified

Netflix, for one, didn't do this. They kept allowing this guy to "resend his confirmation email" periodically over several months (I never had a Netflix account).

My theory is that it was an affiliate scam of some sort; someone probably got paid for everyone who signed up with his code. So he "signed up" thousands of random mails in the hope that some of them would click through on the "you're almost ready to start your Netflix journey!" mail and actually subscribe to Netflix.

I'm currently in the endless email loop because someone named Raymond used one of my Gmail names to register with State Farm. One of their agents even emails me directly when he gets really behind on his payments but won't do anything when I tell them it's the wrong email.

In the past when this happens I usually reset the password and change the email to some anon throwaway but I can't do that without Raymonds DOB (don't quote me on that, been a while since I tried).

This exact thing happened to me with a State Farm agent.

After a few months, I told them I was concerned about the privacy ramifications and would have to report it to their state insurance regulator, and it was very quickly fixed.

No need to look for malicious intentions, this is just a feature that costs money so it's very low (or zero) priority for profit driven organisations.

I wonder if finding people responsible and spamming then with their own service emails would make the team care enough to fix this. But of course that's mostly dubious, probably illegal, and shouldn't be a responsibility of some vigilante hacker

With AI these days it’d cost almost zero money. /s

If bartenders are legally (including criminally!) liable in some jurisdictions for their customers, then certainly a chain of legal liability can exist in other industries.

Yes but bartenders overserving is a crime done by a working-class person and not a wealthy business.

What are you envisioning exactly?

Am I supposed to envision something?

When pointing out that legal parallels exist, to enact a solution, must I envision that solution?

> No need to look for malicious intentions, this is just a feature that costs money so it's very low (or zero) priority for profit driven organisations.

Malicious in-attention then, by the profit driven org? :)

What is the word for harming other people in order to make more money for yourself, if not "malicious"?

Ah the old "reverse identity theft".

Relevant xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/1279/

Yeah, I get the same regularly.

Smartly, I got firstnamemiddleinitiallastname@gmail.com. I never get anybody else' details.

On the other hand... Occasionally someone gets my info because some careless person entered my email address into their system incorrectly. You'd think this problem would be solved by moving to a custom domain, but I still once in a while find someone completely ignore what I put into the form and sign me up as firstnamelastname@gmail.com.

The point of the system is what it does.

They can't just say "we don't want to deal with small timers who will not pay us big bucks doing nonstandard things" without pushback but they can write the policy so that a huge fraction of those use cases fall into some crack that can only be got out of by incurring the kind of expense that's a non-starter for those users. Your municipal code is rife with examples of this.

This is a catchy aphorism, but not really true. Things can be badly implemented so that they fail to achieve their purpose.

People often have trouble with this saying, and that trouble often boils down to the difference between intent and purpose.

The people who create a system have some intent for it. The system may or may not effectively achieve that intent, may or may not outlive the initial conditions that surrounded its creation, and may or may not have side effects.

Purpose is something humans assign. It is sometimes linked to intent. A carpenter's hammer is intended to drive and pull nails, and that is often also its purpose. The purpose of the hammer I keep in my basement is breaking open walnuts.

The phrase is stating that the purpose we should assign to systems when judging them is their outcome, and not the intent behind them.

Sometimes intent and outcomes matter, but the aphorism is simply not a good guide to understanding reality. It should be discarded.

The classic example is a hospital for treating cancer patients. Suppose that one third of the patients are successfully treated, while the other two thirds die of their cancer. Is the purpose of the hospital to kill two thirds of the patients? Clearly not, but that is the outcome.

No, that is not what the hospital does, and thus based on this heuristic, it is not its purpose. What a system does is not the same as the context-free outcome. It is the outcome compared to the outcome that could be expected without the system. You have to define your priors.

However, if the expected 5 year mortality for the cancer was 50%, and with this treatment 2/3 died, then the rule would apply. A choice to continue using that treatment could be criticized as equivalent to a choice to kill 1/6 more patients. Because despite the intention, the known outcome was more patients dying.

Good! You are thinking! In principle something like this should be the right answer. (But we can simplify it by simply saying that we expect the hospital to improve outcomes, even though it cannot cure every patient.)

But no, the truth is that this hospital was built to provide jobs for civil servants <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-5zEb1oS9A>. The purpose of a thing does not have to be related to the outcome.

It's entirely on us as citizens to leaving them as pet peeves instead of crafting them into strategic law that makes them not only illegal but shunned. A little bit of structure goes a long way here.

Once got one of those with a disclaimer that clicking any link was giving permission to subscribe me…

I believe they included the “unsubscribe” link too…

happens with apple products all the time

> Either people who do this for a living have no clue how to do their job,

how naive. most of the world work to survive, not because its their dream vocation. they probably dont care as much as you do

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