Eighteen and Abandoned | Hacker News Reader

Eighteen and Abandoned

newyorker.com

78 pointsfootpath36 comments

When GMail came out, it was 2004 and the Iraq war was in full swing. I watched the service launch into beta and then resigned myself to not receiving an invite, until I received an invite at wil@wilwheaton.net, a domain I had been squatting at the time, because it was hilarious. Hilarious, but that's another story.

Anyway, I was an everyday, average idiot, receiving an exclusive invite to what was sure the be the premier email service of all time. A gigabyte. Holy fuck. That is such an inconceivable amount of storage, etc. It really is, still. I've never come close to using even a measurable amount of it. Why even have a limit? I'm digressing here. What a cool story.

Anyway, instead of registering my own name, which I did, I registered hitler@gmail.com. To this day, it's basically radioactive. It receives an absurd amount of spam, even withe GMail's fantastic filtering, and why would I want to receive mail at hitler@gmail.com? If only I could ask my 22 year old self, because I sure as hell don't remember why that was so hilarious. Kid stuff. My very liberal girlfriend at the time didn't think it was very funny.

Every once in a while, I log into it, chuckle a little bit at some of the things people have used the email address for (mostly forum signups and Williams-Sonoma mailing list entries), and forget that I had registered the address for another couple of years.

I think the thing is that it was an email service that was launched by an already extant search provider, whereas before most email services had grown organically, beating out the land rush for Hilarious Email Addresses. That said, if anyone wants that email address, let me know. I'll take some fraction of a bitcoin or something for it, you fucking anti-semite.

Just a correction that the email address I received it at was wil@wilwheaton.org, not .net.

OK, I'll take it. Post your public BTC or LTC address.

My gmail account has been suffering a similar problem in that someone uses it for their throwaway signups for computer game forums and the like. Either that or it's a very effective form of spam to pretend to be the "initial registration" message, as by definition such email has to be the first contact.

There is still much to be said for spam filtering though as it catches 5-10 a day for me. Layer priority inbox on top of that and only checking mail when you need to, not letting it interrupt you, and you can get some clarity.

I wonder if someone can come up with a proper paid competitor to gmail, it would be something I would be interested in. What are the current alternatives?

The only paid email service that I have ever used, and would recommend, is fastmail: https://www.fastmail.fm/

It's run by the fine folks at Opera Software (the Browser).

“I wonder if someone can come up with a proper paid competitor to gmail, it would be something I would be interested in.”

If you use OS X or iOS, you may want to look into Apple’s free email service. The native apps are great and the web interface, while not as full featured as GMail, is responsive and well designed. (There’s also Windows integration, but you’ll need Outlook for that.)

I've had a mac.com email address since January of 2000. Never lost an email, I have about 60,000 emails in there now. Compared to POP/IMAP, I especially like that it’s push email and it lets me search my archive from my mobile device, without having to download my entire archive. I think that, once you use GMail or iCloud, it’s hard to go back to POP/IMAP.

http://www.apple.com/icloud/features/calendar-contacts-mail....

If you have the time and inclination can't you now take over the accounts on those forums?

Something like [recover password]; "We've sent your password to your email address"; [log in and change password, and engage in shenanigans].

Likewise, with the added problem for me that most of my spam is in a foreign language. I own a firstname@gmail.com account where firstname is reasonably popular in a certain country.

I get so much spam, but generally it's personal and tied to a real human being trying to do something useful with the address. People have bought holidays, theatre tickets, food, books and more in the last year or so.

I try and cancel everything in a polite and sane way, but some large companies with the address in their systems don't care. I get cellphone bills for one guy like clockwork every month.

So frustrating.

> I wonder if someone can come up with a proper paid competitor to gmail, it would be something I would be interested in. What are the current alternatives?

If you only do webmail, nobody else really compares. If you're OK with a native client and IMAP/POP, then Rackspace Mail is #1. 100% uptime SLA, good spam filtering, 24/7/365 phone/online support, big 25GB mailboxes, and just $2 per user.

... per month.

I feel like I'm trapped with some slightly drunk person at a cocktail party.

Agreed. I sometimes wish slightly drunk people at cocktail parties would skip to the next paragraph. Or skip to the last paragraph before I decide whether I want to hear the ones in between.

I'm not nearly as interested in the story of eighteen@gmail.com as I would be in the story of john@doe.com. :)

I believe that’s posted at http://www.example.com/archive/johndoe.htm ;)

To whoever owns test@test.com, I apologise.

a friend of mine had a web site that they were about to demo to a potential client, and it had some CMS sort of capabilities, and they had filled it with lorem-ipsum type content, and "fake" urls: they just typed in a bunch of Xs. for example "xxxxx.xxx" ... of course, .xxx is a real TLD now, and all the x* sites have been squatted by porn. They caught it 30 minutes before the demo - my friend almost choking on his coffee when he absentmindedly clicked one of the links - and they had to search and replace the whole database to be "example.com" everywhere.

Interestingly, xxxxx.xxx hasn't just been squatted by some porn provider. It appears to be owned and run by ICM Registry LLC, the registry for .xxx and the company which convinced ICANN to allow them to run the TLD.

So basically, the company that lobbied for and created .xxx didn't just know that people were going to squat xxxxx.xxx domain names used as placeholders, they actually got in on the act themselves before anyone else could.

Pity the poor foo at http://bar.com/.

If you're doing web development and try to go to localhost:8080 while your server isn't up, Chrome offers to take you to the blog of a very clever person who is apparently a Chinese-speaking woman: http://localhost-8080.com/

Hitting the "Translate" button in Chrome yields a tantalizing hint of blog entries that might be very interesting, but then again might just be mundane stuff spiced up by Google's quirky attempt at translation. Unfortunately, the translation is too garbled to follow in more than an impressionistic way.

You should be using http://example.com

At our firm, Testie McTesterson (test@example.com) is almost a real person.

Perhaps I could arrange a date for yours and our local Facebook tester, Testina McTestiburger. I'm sure they'd get along famously.

Somewhat related, isn't it a sensible idea for Google to allow reusing deleted accounts after "a reasonable" period? I can imagine good handles are becoming increasingly rare.

On the other hand, I realize the 3.0 version of the web may end up doing away with handles and URLs for all practical purposes...

I don't think so. Hotmail used to have a similar "feature": when the email address hadn't been logged in for 270 days, the account would be available again [1]. This was troubling because if I had signed up for some other service using my Hotmail address (say, a Gmail account) and didn't log in to my Hotmail account for nine months, whoever wanted to compromise my other account (Gmail, in this case) could sign up for Hotmail using my old username, and initiate a password reset. The password reset would go to my Hotmail, which no longer belongs to me.

Like it or not, email addresses are used to identify users on the web. This is based on the assumption that an email's ownership doesn't change. Recycling email addresses is dangerous given our reliance on emails as identification.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotmail#Hotmail_Plus

That reminds me of a paid Hotmail Plus account that I used to have, back in 2005 or so. I never renewed it because I finally got hold of a Gmail account shortly afterward, but the address is apparently still active after 8 years because every once in a while, I receive spam addressed to my old Hotmail address (forwarded to my "old" Gmail address). Not only is the account active, but even email forwarding (which were only available to paid users back then) still appears to be working.

My Gmail address gets all this same sort of stuff, except I use it actively, and have to filter it out constantly.

I even wrote a blog post about it and have to send out the following canned response at least once a day:

Hi there,

You've reached the wrong email address. Please double-check and try again!

You may also want to read the following: http://blog.jasonhanley.com/2008/10/will-real-jhanley-please...

I have the same issue with my gmail, also first initial & last name. It's amazing to me how many people don't know their own email address

This is part of the reason that while I have addresses with my real name, I usually use my alias. I consider it actually a bit odd that with my generation (grew up in the 90s) there's a significant portion of us that picked an alias and have had that alias for a very large portion of our lives, for me it's about 2/3 of my life.

Though to be honest even my own mother can't remember my email address even though I've had the same one for over a decade now. (HN username @ yahoo is one i've had for a long time).

I use a couple different emails for different purposes myself. A couple different names I use online for most things and my first initial last name for more professional stuff (ie: resumes, clients, etc)

I'm routinely amazed at the number of sites which don't perform any sort of email address validation. My wife has a rather common name and a straightforward firstname.lastname gmail address.

As a result, she's continuously peppered with all sorts of notices and confirmations intended for one of her many namesakes as well as the occasional, amusing accusation of having "stolen" the address she has used since summer '04.

My Gmail address is really generic (my first name and a number), and I too get signups all the time - I even currently have two different people's bank accounts sending me email.

I feel kind of bad, because one of them from Wells Fargo has been telling the person that one of their accounts has been closed and their automatic bill payments from it have been stopped - so I hope they worked that out before they were kicked out of a rental place or something...

There's really nothing I can do - all bank's contact methods require you to log into their account to send a "secure message", which I can't do (I do sometimes cancel people's accounts who use my email using the "Forgot password" recovery, but I'm not going to do that on someone's bank account, and you'd need their social security number with most banks anyway), and I have no idea what their real email address would be.

So, please let this be a lesson to anyone who makes services people sign up for: Always send a confirmation email where if you don't confirm it doesn't send you emails, or at least please send a welcome email having a link where people can disassociate their email address if it's incorrect. I've only seen Google doing this latter part properly...

And, if another service requires me to log into somebody else's account to stop it spamming me... Seriously, just make it one-click unsubscribe...

>My Gmail address is really generic (my first name and a number), and I too get signups all the time - I even currently have two different people's bank accounts sending me email.

We've seen the same. Of all places you'd think (hope) that banks would have a handle on such things.

Nothing you can do? You could always write a letter.

I didn't see any mention of gmail coming out of beta. I wonder if gmail has been in beta for most of the life of this addy.

Also would have been smart in retrospect to invest a few hundred in Apple stock back then, instead of futzing around with email addresses. :-)

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/gmail-leaves-beta-laun...

Yes, people get mail that is misdirected, and sometimes receive spam as well.

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