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-ope

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