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I remember getting a demand I surrender my HoTMaiL address to somebody in a very threatening email to my address way back in 1998. It was kind of surreal back t

I remember getting a demand I surrender my HoTMaiL address to somebody in a very threatening email to my address way back in 1998. It was kind of surreal back then as the internet was still fresh. Nowadays the closest I've gotten to this is the people who keep using my Gmail address as their own email address. I find this behavior rather bizarre and don't know what it achieves.

shever73 4y ago
Yep, I get the same. My Gmail is a simple first initial + surname, and I've received payslips, job offers and, most entertainingly, invitations to speak at a neurosurgery conference in Brazil.
rotexo 4y ago
I was the target of an online harassment campaign, and very soon afterwards I got a bunch of emails confirming registration on a whole range of forums I had never heard of. Seemed like people were using my email address for forum spam. I’ve been trying to migrate to a new email address ever since, not sure what else to do about it.
hx2a 4y ago
> Nowadays the closest I've gotten to this is the people who keep using my Gmail address as their own email address. I find this behavior rather bizarre and don't know what it achieves. I have this problem also! I thought it was rare. In my case I think the person is very bad with computers and doesn't know what their email address is. I've gotten emails from their bank, cell phone, and even online dating. I tried mailing them a letter once to tell them they are making a mistake but nothing changed.
- TheNewsIsHere 4y ago
  I have the same problem. Mostly for an old MobileMe/iCloud alias, but also for an entire domain that I own. Someone keeps signing up for Instagram accounts in another language. My every day email is my name@myname.com, and I’ve had to purchase several typo domains and alias them.
- FrenchDevRemote 4y ago
  could this be credential stuffing attempts? or just typos?
  - bombcar 4y ago
    usually it is someone who has their email john.r.smith or similar and forgets they need the r There are other stories of people forgetting which company it was with (gmail vs yahoo) and even of google accidentally giving out emails with a period and then silently removing periods.
    - joe_g_young 4y ago
      The Gmail domain will deliver email to an email address regardless of periods in the username. My email address is first name period middle initial period last name. I can a period between any letter, all letters or none and I can still receive it.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Yeah, the story goes that very early on it let two people register joe.blow and joeblow.
        astrange 4y ago
        PayPal let someone else add my Gmail address to their account, so I have to use a +paypal in my own account email.
- fortran77 4y ago
  my gmail is my <lastname>@gmail.com It's not a super-common lastname, but there are probably several hundred people with it in the US. I get all sorts of email for people whose address is some variant of it, like <firstname.lastname>@gmail.com. I've gotten plane tickets, paypal payments, cancer diagnoses, Bar Mitzvah and Wedding invitations, college transcripts, all sorts of personal information. In many cases, I don't think it's the fault of the person with the email; I think they give their email as "firstname.lastname@gmail.com" and some clerk just uses "lastname@gmail.com"
  - wrycoder 4y ago
    My Gmail is firstname.lastname@gmail and I get mail to that account that’s not for me. Must be the other party has a middle initial they are leaving out.
    - Brajeshwar 4y ago
      I would be careful with the "." in your username as someone else with `firstnamelastname@gmail.com` would likely get your email. I get the emails that are my ID with the "." in between.
      - wrycoder 4y ago
        I thought that gmail ignored the period, and would not allow registering one of those accounts if the other one already existed.
        Brajeshwar 4y ago
        Well then, they didn't or it is relaxed now. I'm at the receiving end.
        em-bee 4y ago
        more likely some people just don't know how to write their own email address. or typos.
- dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago
  I had some person's client email me regularly for years, which I ignored. One day I decided to take action and sent a expletive filled email to them telling them that I was not the person they thought I was and to stop emailing me. They then sent me an email telling me I was fired.
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    Quick, tell them where you want your last paycheck sent...
    - dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago
      They sent me a list of all the system passwords at one point. I should have put myself on the payroll.
- tinus_hn 4y ago
  I’ve gotten invitations for a GP system, among countless signups for games as well as an account approval for a car. I’ve gotten a hold of one person who was ordering curtains with my email address, they were nice, I got hold of another person who was repairing their phone and they got angry. It’s really quite annoying, and half of the services aren’t even confirming the address, they just put whatever you fill in on the account and start sending ‘informational’ spam.
markdown 4y ago
> Nowadays the closest I've gotten to this is the people who keep using my Gmail address as their own email address. I find this behavior rather bizarre and don't know what it achieves. I have a very common english <firstname><lastname>@outlook.com address. My inbox is always full of bank statements, invoices, and all sorts of business correspondence and bills from all over the world. It made the address unusable.
maxk42 4y ago
Likewise I have no fewer than three people trying to use a gmail address I've had since 2003 as their own. It's extremely frustrating - one even sent me $45,000 in a mistaken paypal transfer and then when I reversed the charges I was hit with an overdraft since I had made a Paypal purchase (which would ordinarily come from my direct bank funds) not knowing the money had been sent to me in error. It shouldn't be this easy to use someone else's email address.
- metadat 4y ago
  That was nice of you, you probably could've kept the money and there isn't much they could've done. Ask me how I know :( PP money was not recoverable that one time my ex sent it to the wrong email address.
  - maxk42 4y ago
    Paypal has a "reverse charge" button. You should be able to cancel any payment within a reasonable timeframe.
    - metadat 4y ago
      Must be a newer feature, this was back in 2014 and there was no button. Thankfully it was only $500 bucks or so, not $45,000.
- maxk42 4y ago
  (Meanwhile, Google flags every log-in from my daily Linux driver as a potential security issue. Madness.)
- xoa 4y ago
  I have an old 7 letter gmail address, not an English word even but it must mean something in India and someone must have used it because for years I got eye-opening stuff, full color scans of national IDs, job applications, business proposals, invoices etc. At first I tried to send messages back explaining but in the end I just had to block it all, didn't have the time. >It shouldn't be this easy to use someone else's email address. This though, seems hard. I don't think this is a "security" thing per se (though I dearly wish there was a modernized "email" system built with modern crypto from the ground up). But for any sort of communications at all it seems like there is an inherent tension between how low friction one wants for the world to communicate vs protection. Like, there is nothing stopping anyone from doing a pure whitelist system for email right now. I even do in fact do that for a few accounts like specific ones for client contacts, only active client addresses will be accepted everything else is blackholed. Those obviously receive zero spam or misuse of any kind [0]. But obviously the tradeoff for that is no new potential clients could ever "cold call" it either. One could imagine technical solutions like "only accept stranger email from accounts with a signed ID" or "vouched for by known address" (ie, WoT) or "only address with a signed time token >N from providers X, Y or Z", or some kind of challenge/response, but all would have privacy tradeoffs, complexity, and still wouldn't inherently do anything about honest mistakes. We could have more powerful options for this, but it'd still involve subjective tradeoffs between how open to new communications one wants to be vs cutting down on noise. No one right answer there. ---- 0: Forged from fields are of course possible but in practice someone would at the least have to know which handful of the total planetary email addresses were whitelisted, never mind flags that show up in the headers from that
Brajeshwar 4y ago
Hotmail: It was really easy to "hack" hotmail during that time. I created mine in 1999 and lost in early 2000. By summer 2000, I happen to talk to a friend of a friend who works at Hotmail. I got him to reset and give me a new Password that worked. I still have my hotmail account and is used to the times when you need a Microsoft Account. Gmail: A lot of people seem to think email, then "Gmail". I get emails of at-least 4 (or is it 5) people who have used some variation and also exact ID of my Gmail account (created when it came out in beta). I get details of their Credit Card, Bank, Phone, and what not. I just ignore/delete them but someone with time and fun/bad intention can do some serious harm. I have tried sending emails, contacting them few times but to no good result. One got angry that I have access to "his email". From the mail history, I feel really sorry for them. They are definitely not well-off and I feel I should protect this part of their digital identity. :-)
- Group_B 4y ago
  You have random strangers typing in your exact email address thinking they own it?
  - Brajeshwar 4y ago
    1. They have used "." in between the usernames which I have full access to. 2. They gave that as their email (Gmail) ID when the banks, ISPs, asked and the institutes never validated it. To the other Brajeshwars, they are like "Oh! Email/Gmail, then it must be brajeshwar@gmail.com." But then I end up getting their emails.
- wyclif 4y ago
  I also have <mylastname>@gmail.com because I got my account before April 1st, 2004 (the public release date). My name is also uncommon but it's very English, so I get weird email from England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand—anywhere there was an Anglo diaspora. I've given up trying to do anything about it, and it really isn't a problem because the volume is very low. I have tried sending emails, contacting them few times but to no good result. As someone who's had this same Gmail address for 18 years, I'm here to tell you it is absolutely a pointless waste of your time and almost never results in the sender changing their address book, workflow, or typing skills.
anonAndOn 4y ago
I have a similar gmail address as a successful VC. As a result of this coincidence, I get unsolicited pitches for startups regularly. My anecdotal evidence suggests that 100% of unsolicited startup pitches are dumpster fires of cash. YMMV
c22 4y ago
I have a domain I've used pretty much just for email for the past 25 years. The domain is similar in a kinda h4cker l33tsp34k way to the name of a SaaS that started up about 8 years ago and offers a free trial. Now I get multiple emails a day due to people being clever and using their made up name @ my domain for their test accounts. It was hard to filter it at first since people kept exploring areas of the trial that generated novel message templates and the messages seemed to come from an endless supply of unique hosts. At one point I contacted the SaaS company about it but they told me there was "nothing they could do" even when I promised I was the only user at that domain and I had no intent to sign up to their service with it. I used to just log into their trial and delete the account, but while trying to automate this I figured out a better way to do my filters so the emails don't really bug me anymore (except in the cases when someone picks an alias I already have in use).
blacklion 4y ago
Same here. You could guess my GMail e-mail from my HN login :-) Looks like it is popular among some ethnic groups. I get applications for waitress for Black Lion Pub in the middle of the England, tons of registrations to any and each popular service which doesn't require e-mail validation, receipts from all around the world for online purchases (from dresses to drugs to surgical treatment of cats and dogs). I don't mention registrations in several recruitment agencies for low-wage workers ("I" was offered positions of forklift operator, gas station worker, etc). There was whole year+, when PA of some real estate agency in Florida used this e-mail to book airline tickets and hotels for her boss. It was at least a trip each week, all around Florida and neighboring states. I've wrote to hotels, I've wrote to public e-mail of this agency - to no success. I've cancelled these bookings - they were re-booked, sometimes for much higher price. One time Ive canceled non-refundable booking for hotel 6 times in a row. It was re-booked each time, nothing changed! In the end I've filtered out all messages addressed to this person (name was always the same, it is what allowed me to figure out firm & person). After year or year and the half it stopped.
raverbashing 4y ago
> the people who keep using my Gmail address as their own email address I think it's a mix of room temperature IQ and Main Character syndrome thinking they're the only ones with their own name (especially if it's common)

shever73 4y ago

Yep, I get the same. My Gmail is a simple first initial + surname, and I've received payslips, job offers and, most entertainingly, invitations to speak at a neurosurgery conference in Brazil.

rotexo 4y ago

I was the target of an online harassment campaign, and very soon afterwards I got a bunch of emails confirming registration on a whole range of forums I had never heard of. Seemed like people were using my email address for forum spam. I’ve been trying to migrate to a new email address ever since, not sure what else to do about it.

hx2a 4y ago

> Nowadays the closest I've gotten to this is the people who keep using my Gmail address as their own email address. I find this behavior rather bizarre and don't know what it achieves. I have this problem also! I thought it was rare. In my case I think the person is very bad with computers and doesn't know what their email address is. I've gotten emails from their bank, cell phone, and even online dating. I tried mailing them a letter once to tell them they are making a mistake but nothing changed.

TheNewsIsHere 4y ago
I have the same problem. Mostly for an old MobileMe/iCloud alias, but also for an entire domain that I own. Someone keeps signing up for Instagram accounts in another language. My every day email is my name@myname.com, and I’ve had to purchase several typo domains and alias them.
FrenchDevRemote 4y ago
could this be credential stuffing attempts? or just typos?
- bombcar 4y ago
  usually it is someone who has their email john.r.smith or similar and forgets they need the r There are other stories of people forgetting which company it was with (gmail vs yahoo) and even of google accidentally giving out emails with a period and then silently removing periods.
  - joe_g_young 4y ago
    The Gmail domain will deliver email to an email address regardless of periods in the username. My email address is first name period middle initial period last name. I can a period between any letter, all letters or none and I can still receive it.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Yeah, the story goes that very early on it let two people register joe.blow and joeblow.
      - astrange 4y ago
        PayPal let someone else add my Gmail address to their account, so I have to use a +paypal in my own account email.
fortran77 4y ago
my gmail is my <lastname>@gmail.com It's not a super-common lastname, but there are probably several hundred people with it in the US. I get all sorts of email for people whose address is some variant of it, like <firstname.lastname>@gmail.com. I've gotten plane tickets, paypal payments, cancer diagnoses, Bar Mitzvah and Wedding invitations, college transcripts, all sorts of personal information. In many cases, I don't think it's the fault of the person with the email; I think they give their email as "firstname.lastname@gmail.com" and some clerk just uses "lastname@gmail.com"
- wrycoder 4y ago
  My Gmail is firstname.lastname@gmail and I get mail to that account that’s not for me. Must be the other party has a middle initial they are leaving out.
  - Brajeshwar 4y ago
    I would be careful with the "." in your username as someone else with `firstnamelastname@gmail.com` would likely get your email. I get the emails that are my ID with the "." in between.
    - wrycoder 4y ago
      I thought that gmail ignored the period, and would not allow registering one of those accounts if the other one already existed.
      - Brajeshwar 4y ago
        Well then, they didn't or it is relaxed now. I'm at the receiving end.
        em-bee 4y ago
        more likely some people just don't know how to write their own email address. or typos.
dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago
I had some person's client email me regularly for years, which I ignored. One day I decided to take action and sent a expletive filled email to them telling them that I was not the person they thought I was and to stop emailing me. They then sent me an email telling me I was fired.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  Quick, tell them where you want your last paycheck sent...
  - dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago
    They sent me a list of all the system passwords at one point. I should have put myself on the payroll.
tinus_hn 4y ago
I’ve gotten invitations for a GP system, among countless signups for games as well as an account approval for a car. I’ve gotten a hold of one person who was ordering curtains with my email address, they were nice, I got hold of another person who was repairing their phone and they got angry. It’s really quite annoying, and half of the services aren’t even confirming the address, they just put whatever you fill in on the account and start sending ‘informational’ spam.

markdown 4y ago

> Nowadays the closest I've gotten to this is the people who keep using my Gmail address as their own email address. I find this behavior rather bizarre and don't know what it achieves. I have a very common english <firstname><lastname>@outlook.com address. My inbox is always full of bank statements, invoices, and all sorts of business correspondence and bills from all over the world. It made the address unusable.

maxk42 4y ago

Likewise I have no fewer than three people trying to use a gmail address I've had since 2003 as their own. It's extremely frustrating - one even sent me $45,000 in a mistaken paypal transfer and then when I reversed the charges I was hit with an overdraft since I had made a Paypal purchase (which would ordinarily come from my direct bank funds) not knowing the money had been sent to me in error. It shouldn't be this easy to use someone else's email address.

metadat 4y ago
That was nice of you, you probably could've kept the money and there isn't much they could've done. Ask me how I know :( PP money was not recoverable that one time my ex sent it to the wrong email address.
- maxk42 4y ago
  Paypal has a "reverse charge" button. You should be able to cancel any payment within a reasonable timeframe.
  - metadat 4y ago
    Must be a newer feature, this was back in 2014 and there was no button. Thankfully it was only $500 bucks or so, not $45,000.
maxk42 4y ago
(Meanwhile, Google flags every log-in from my daily Linux driver as a potential security issue. Madness.)
xoa 4y ago
I have an old 7 letter gmail address, not an English word even but it must mean something in India and someone must have used it because for years I got eye-opening stuff, full color scans of national IDs, job applications, business proposals, invoices etc. At first I tried to send messages back explaining but in the end I just had to block it all, didn't have the time. >It shouldn't be this easy to use someone else's email address. This though, seems hard. I don't think this is a "security" thing per se (though I dearly wish there was a modernized "email" system built with modern crypto from the ground up). But for any sort of communications at all it seems like there is an inherent tension between how low friction one wants for the world to communicate vs protection. Like, there is nothing stopping anyone from doing a pure whitelist system for email right now. I even do in fact do that for a few accounts like specific ones for client contacts, only active client addresses will be accepted everything else is blackholed. Those obviously receive zero spam or misuse of any kind [0]. But obviously the tradeoff for that is no new potential clients could ever "cold call" it either. One could imagine technical solutions like "only accept stranger email from accounts with a signed ID" or "vouched for by known address" (ie, WoT) or "only address with a signed time token >N from providers X, Y or Z", or some kind of challenge/response, but all would have privacy tradeoffs, complexity, and still wouldn't inherently do anything about honest mistakes. We could have more powerful options for this, but it'd still involve subjective tradeoffs between how open to new communications one wants to be vs cutting down on noise. No one right answer there. ---- 0: Forged from fields are of course possible but in practice someone would at the least have to know which handful of the total planetary email addresses were whitelisted, never mind flags that show up in the headers from that

Brajeshwar 4y ago

Hotmail: It was really easy to "hack" hotmail during that time. I created mine in 1999 and lost in early 2000. By summer 2000, I happen to talk to a friend of a friend who works at Hotmail. I got him to reset and give me a new Password that worked. I still have my hotmail account and is used to the times when you need a Microsoft Account. Gmail: A lot of people seem to think email, then "Gmail". I get emails of at-least 4 (or is it 5) people who have used some variation and also exact ID of my Gmail account (created when it came out in beta). I get details of their Credit Card, Bank, Phone, and what not. I just ignore/delete them but someone with time and fun/bad intention can do some serious harm. I have tried sending emails, contacting them few times but to no good result. One got angry that I have access to "his email". From the mail history, I feel really sorry for them. They are definitely not well-off and I feel I should protect this part of their digital identity. :-)

Group_B 4y ago
You have random strangers typing in your exact email address thinking they own it?
- Brajeshwar 4y ago
  1. They have used "." in between the usernames which I have full access to. 2. They gave that as their email (Gmail) ID when the banks, ISPs, asked and the institutes never validated it. To the other Brajeshwars, they are like "Oh! Email/Gmail, then it must be brajeshwar@gmail.com." But then I end up getting their emails.
wyclif 4y ago
I also have <mylastname>@gmail.com because I got my account before April 1st, 2004 (the public release date). My name is also uncommon but it's very English, so I get weird email from England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand—anywhere there was an Anglo diaspora. I've given up trying to do anything about it, and it really isn't a problem because the volume is very low. I have tried sending emails, contacting them few times but to no good result. As someone who's had this same Gmail address for 18 years, I'm here to tell you it is absolutely a pointless waste of your time and almost never results in the sender changing their address book, workflow, or typing skills.

anonAndOn 4y ago

I have a similar gmail address as a successful VC. As a result of this coincidence, I get unsolicited pitches for startups regularly. My anecdotal evidence suggests that 100% of unsolicited startup pitches are dumpster fires of cash. YMMV

c22 4y ago

I have a domain I've used pretty much just for email for the past 25 years. The domain is similar in a kinda h4cker l33tsp34k way to the name of a SaaS that started up about 8 years ago and offers a free trial. Now I get multiple emails a day due to people being clever and using their made up name @ my domain for their test accounts. It was hard to filter it at first since people kept exploring areas of the trial that generated novel message templates and the messages seemed to come from an endless supply of unique hosts. At one point I contacted the SaaS company about it but they told me there was "nothing they could do" even when I promised I was the only user at that domain and I had no intent to sign up to their service with it. I used to just log into their trial and delete the account, but while trying to automate this I figured out a better way to do my filters so the emails don't really bug me anymore (except in the cases when someone picks an alias I already have in use).

blacklion 4y ago

Same here. You could guess my GMail e-mail from my HN login :-) Looks like it is popular among some ethnic groups. I get applications for waitress for Black Lion Pub in the middle of the England, tons of registrations to any and each popular service which doesn't require e-mail validation, receipts from all around the world for online purchases (from dresses to drugs to surgical treatment of cats and dogs). I don't mention registrations in several recruitment agencies for low-wage workers ("I" was offered positions of forklift operator, gas station worker, etc). There was whole year+, when PA of some real estate agency in Florida used this e-mail to book airline tickets and hotels for her boss. It was at least a trip each week, all around Florida and neighboring states. I've wrote to hotels, I've wrote to public e-mail of this agency - to no success. I've cancelled these bookings - they were re-booked, sometimes for much higher price. One time Ive canceled non-refundable booking for hotel 6 times in a row. It was re-booked each time, nothing changed! In the end I've filtered out all messages addressed to this person (name was always the same, it is what allowed me to figure out firm & person). After year or year and the half it stopped.

raverbashing 4y ago

> the people who keep using my Gmail address as their own email address I think it's a mix of room temperature IQ and Main Character syndrome thinking they're the only ones with their own name (especially if it's common)