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I really wish that I could tell google to bounce all the emails that don’t match my “dot pattern” I’m now in complete control of someone else’s commercial busi

by sorahn 9y ago

I really wish that I could tell google to bounce all the emails that don’t match my “dot pattern” I’m now in complete control of someone else’s commercial business hvac account because of precisely this problem. And the worse part is that I don’t know the correct email to get ahold of this person. They’ve set up library appointments, I received a receipt for a down payment on a lake house, basically most of this persons recent attempt to start a commercial business has been emailed to me. I don’t want this email google. Please give us the option to make it stop.

paulcole 9y ago
Just create a filter to send everything that doesn’t match your dot pattern to the trash. I have a relatively common first name / last name gmail account and it gets out of control sometimes.
- sorahn 9y ago
  My issue with doing that is that the other person will never get help. They’ll just say “oh my emails keep getting lost”, but if google would bounce them, then hopefully one of these services would notify the person that that isn’t their email. Instead of them happily continuing to send it all to me.
  - shkkmo 9y ago
    Very few services manage email delivery well enough to propagate email bounces back to their user account info.
  - paulcole 9y ago
    The amount of consideration I'm willing to extend to a person who either doesn't know their own email address or is trying to scam me isn't that great. Sometimes I'll text the person and complement them on their choice of purchases- yesterday it was a stunningly large Domino's pizza order.
- everybodyknows 9y ago
  Don't see a way to do that in the web UI. There's a "To" box in the first page for filter setup, but no obvious way to negate so as to specify "NOT To".
ocdtrekkie 9y ago
Do you also, by chance, have a short Gmail address? I've also definitely gotten signups from other individuals mistyping their address on my six letter account. My comedy ownership of someone else's identity is a Staples account. Presumably someone in New York with a similar name had a store person look up their Staples account, which was actually my Staples account, and associate their business name with it. Their business name now appears on mailings I get from Staples and sometimes I get sample pens and the like branded with their business name.
- sorahn 9y ago
  It’s not too short. 12 characters including the name separating dot. This person that recently started using this email is using the same name but with no dot. first.lastname@gmail is what I use, and now I’m getting a bunch for firstlastname@gmail. Some of these emails look pretty important too, if I had malicious intent, I could probably ruin and or steal this persons identity and or business with the specific mail that I’ve received recently. I’m really amazed at the lack of confirmation of emails before sending things like your HVAC business license, or city contracting permits, that have other people’s identifying information in them too.
  - djur 9y ago
    Wouldn't the same thing be happening if they'd entered first.lastname@gmail, or if you used firstlastname@gmail? It seems like the problem is that they entered an email address that wasn't actually theirs. The dots don't seem to make a difference.
    - colomon 9y ago
      Indeed, my wife gets this problem all the time on gmail because her name is a fairly common one. The dots don't enter into it in the general case.
Buge 9y ago
That same problem can happen even without dots. People can simply mistype their email and have it be your email. That happens if even if neither of you have dots in your email.
- mulmen 9y ago
  So then send the verification email at signup and any time the user changes the stored email on their account. Am I missing something?
  - Buge 9y ago
    I agree that's the answer. Unfortunately many services out there (including Netflix apparently) don't do that.
  - sorahn 9y ago
    You’re not missing anything, but if gmail delivers all the mail, and I just trash it, we’ve fixed the symptoms, but not the problem, and we’ve made the problem invisible. I agree that sending verification emails should be the standard. But if I can’t bounce the emails then there isn’t even the slightest way to inform the sending service that there might be a problem.
bayindirh 9y ago
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1279/ https://xkcd.com/1279/ I also combat with the same problem from time to time.
endorphone 9y ago
I'm now in complete control of someone else’s commercial business hvac account because of precisely this problem. But that has absolutely nothing to do with the dots. Indeed, almost every comment about this has nothing to do with the dots, including the submission. Someone entered the wrong email address, and in the process got yours. It isn't like the dotted or undotted one is legitimately theirs -- it can't possibly be -- but that they forgot a middle initial or something of the sort. I've written about this before- https://dennisforbes.ca/index.php/2016/04/08/email-addresses-need-a-checksum/ https://dennisforbes.ca/index.php/2016/04/08/email-addresses... -but the issue is with email itself, and the notion that once someone enters an email address it is authoritative. Like you I get a tonne of email for other people. I get travel tickets. I get room reward points. I get calendar events for car service in England. The dots aren't the reason.
- hv42 9y ago
  I strongly disagree with the author as well. Netflix is not doing its job. But the scam described by the author works because he victim already has an account registered with their Gmail address. The warning could be a good idea also I wish the email address of both the recipient and emitter were shown in a better in Gmail.
  - shkkmo 9y ago
    The scam works because of Netflix's lax security practices around verifying emails. Given how easy it is to make a mistake filling in your email address, and email address should never be trusted until it is verified AND you should make clear during your sign-up process that the user should expect a verification email so they know something is wrong when they don't receive one.
  - theclaw 9y ago
    But the author reset the scammer's password, denying them access to their fake account. The scam doesn't seem to work unless Netflix allows you to enter a new credit card number /without/ resetting the password of the scammer's account.
- 9y ago
mannykannot 9y ago
I just tried creating an account that differed from an existing account in the number of dots, and it was refused, explicitly on the grounds that periods and capitalization are ignored. Therefore, either at some point Google got this wrong and allowed the creation of such aliases to an existing account as if they were distinct, or this person is mistyping one of the non-dot characters of their address.
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  Gooogle had a dots bug about 14 years ago and fixed it about 13 years ago. People just mistype addresses and vendors don't verify
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
mulmen 9y ago
You can create a filter on the “to” field of emails. Any email sent to the undesired dot pattern will have whatever action you choose taken on it. Put them in a folder and mark them as read or send them to trash. You can (should) also mark the messages as spam because whoever accepted that address without verifying it shouldn’t be sending emails to it.
shkkmo 9y ago
Can't you use the "report as spam" feature? It would be nice if gmail's filters had "bounce" and/or "report as spam" as available actions.
delecti 9y ago
Something similar happened to me once [1] and I used the password reset process to "hijack" the account. I used that to contact them over facebook, and then assigned the account to their proper email address. They were quite grateful. I'm not sure of the legality of that process, and you could argue the morality of it, but doing this once to one of their less important accounts (library?) might be a good way to get enough information to contact them properly. [1] It wasn't technically the same, because the typo was done by a phone carrier agent, not the person whose account they were setting up. My email is firstname.unrelatedstring, theirs was firstname.theirmiddlename.lastname, but my unrelated string happens to be their middle name.
jjeaff 9y ago
Anytime this happens to me, I immediately log in and change the password. They can work with customer service to get the email corrected.
efreak 9y ago
You may be able to set up filters to automatically trash everything sent to incorrect addresses. It might be fairly annoying, but it should certainly be possible. Just set a filter for firstlast@gmail.com to send them to spam. Also, software such as mailwatcher allows you to bounce emails after they've been received by the server if you think it necessary.

by sorahn 9y ago

paulcole 9y ago

Just create a filter to send everything that doesn’t match your dot pattern to the trash. I have a relatively common first name / last name gmail account and it gets out of control sometimes.

sorahn 9y ago
My issue with doing that is that the other person will never get help. They’ll just say “oh my emails keep getting lost”, but if google would bounce them, then hopefully one of these services would notify the person that that isn’t their email. Instead of them happily continuing to send it all to me.
- shkkmo 9y ago
  Very few services manage email delivery well enough to propagate email bounces back to their user account info.
- paulcole 9y ago
  The amount of consideration I'm willing to extend to a person who either doesn't know their own email address or is trying to scam me isn't that great. Sometimes I'll text the person and complement them on their choice of purchases- yesterday it was a stunningly large Domino's pizza order.
everybodyknows 9y ago
Don't see a way to do that in the web UI. There's a "To" box in the first page for filter setup, but no obvious way to negate so as to specify "NOT To".

ocdtrekkie 9y ago

Do you also, by chance, have a short Gmail address? I've also definitely gotten signups from other individuals mistyping their address on my six letter account. My comedy ownership of someone else's identity is a Staples account. Presumably someone in New York with a similar name had a store person look up their Staples account, which was actually my Staples account, and associate their business name with it. Their business name now appears on mailings I get from Staples and sometimes I get sample pens and the like branded with their business name.

sorahn 9y ago
It’s not too short. 12 characters including the name separating dot. This person that recently started using this email is using the same name but with no dot. first.lastname@gmail is what I use, and now I’m getting a bunch for firstlastname@gmail. Some of these emails look pretty important too, if I had malicious intent, I could probably ruin and or steal this persons identity and or business with the specific mail that I’ve received recently. I’m really amazed at the lack of confirmation of emails before sending things like your HVAC business license, or city contracting permits, that have other people’s identifying information in them too.
- djur 9y ago
  Wouldn't the same thing be happening if they'd entered first.lastname@gmail, or if you used firstlastname@gmail? It seems like the problem is that they entered an email address that wasn't actually theirs. The dots don't seem to make a difference.
  - colomon 9y ago
    Indeed, my wife gets this problem all the time on gmail because her name is a fairly common one. The dots don't enter into it in the general case.

Buge 9y ago

That same problem can happen even without dots. People can simply mistype their email and have it be your email. That happens if even if neither of you have dots in your email.

mulmen 9y ago
So then send the verification email at signup and any time the user changes the stored email on their account. Am I missing something?
- Buge 9y ago
  I agree that's the answer. Unfortunately many services out there (including Netflix apparently) don't do that.
- sorahn 9y ago
  You’re not missing anything, but if gmail delivers all the mail, and I just trash it, we’ve fixed the symptoms, but not the problem, and we’ve made the problem invisible. I agree that sending verification emails should be the standard. But if I can’t bounce the emails then there isn’t even the slightest way to inform the sending service that there might be a problem.

bayindirh 9y ago

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1279/ https://xkcd.com/1279/ I also combat with the same problem from time to time.

endorphone 9y ago

I'm now in complete control of someone else’s commercial business hvac account because of precisely this problem. But that has absolutely nothing to do with the dots. Indeed, almost every comment about this has nothing to do with the dots, including the submission. Someone entered the wrong email address, and in the process got yours. It isn't like the dotted or undotted one is legitimately theirs -- it can't possibly be -- but that they forgot a middle initial or something of the sort. I've written about this before- https://dennisforbes.ca/index.php/2016/04/08/email-addresses-need-a-checksum/ https://dennisforbes.ca/index.php/2016/04/08/email-addresses... -but the issue is with email itself, and the notion that once someone enters an email address it is authoritative. Like you I get a tonne of email for other people. I get travel tickets. I get room reward points. I get calendar events for car service in England. The dots aren't the reason.

hv42 9y ago
I strongly disagree with the author as well. Netflix is not doing its job. But the scam described by the author works because he victim already has an account registered with their Gmail address. The warning could be a good idea also I wish the email address of both the recipient and emitter were shown in a better in Gmail.
- shkkmo 9y ago
  The scam works because of Netflix's lax security practices around verifying emails. Given how easy it is to make a mistake filling in your email address, and email address should never be trusted until it is verified AND you should make clear during your sign-up process that the user should expect a verification email so they know something is wrong when they don't receive one.
- theclaw 9y ago
  But the author reset the scammer's password, denying them access to their fake account. The scam doesn't seem to work unless Netflix allows you to enter a new credit card number /without/ resetting the password of the scammer's account.
9y ago

mannykannot 9y ago

I just tried creating an account that differed from an existing account in the number of dots, and it was refused, explicitly on the grounds that periods and capitalization are ignored. Therefore, either at some point Google got this wrong and allowed the creation of such aliases to an existing account as if they were distinct, or this person is mistyping one of the non-dot characters of their address.

fjsolwmv 9y ago
Gooogle had a dots bug about 14 years ago and fixed it about 13 years ago. People just mistype addresses and vendors don't verify
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

mulmen 9y ago

You can create a filter on the “to” field of emails. Any email sent to the undesired dot pattern will have whatever action you choose taken on it. Put them in a folder and mark them as read or send them to trash. You can (should) also mark the messages as spam because whoever accepted that address without verifying it shouldn’t be sending emails to it.

shkkmo 9y ago

Can't you use the "report as spam" feature? It would be nice if gmail's filters had "bounce" and/or "report as spam" as available actions.

delecti 9y ago

Something similar happened to me once [1] and I used the password reset process to "hijack" the account. I used that to contact them over facebook, and then assigned the account to their proper email address. They were quite grateful. I'm not sure of the legality of that process, and you could argue the morality of it, but doing this once to one of their less important accounts (library?) might be a good way to get enough information to contact them properly. [1] It wasn't technically the same, because the typo was done by a phone carrier agent, not the person whose account they were setting up. My email is firstname.unrelatedstring, theirs was firstname.theirmiddlename.lastname, but my unrelated string happens to be their middle name.

jjeaff 9y ago

Anytime this happens to me, I immediately log in and change the password. They can work with customer service to get the email corrected.

efreak 9y ago

You may be able to set up filters to automatically trash everything sent to incorrect addresses. It might be fairly annoying, but it should certainly be possible. Just set a filter for firstlast@gmail.com to send them to spam. Also, software such as mailwatcher allows you to bounce emails after they've been received by the server if you think it necessary.