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I used to use an e-mail address a terrific domain name that I own. Without publicly disclosing specifics, it was like this: <common_name>@<common_name>.com Th

I used to use an e-mail address a terrific domain name that I own. Without publicly disclosing specifics, it was like this: <common_name>@<common_name>.com Thousands of people with this name, who didn't want to give out their real e-mail address, used this e-mail address when signing up for things online. They probably never thought it would be someone's actual address. I finally had to quit using it because of the tremendous amount of e-mail that wasn't directed at me. Most of it looked legit enough to the spam filters to allow through. I temporarily turned that account on about 5 years ago and it was getting about 3,000 garbage messages per day. I thought having a cool e-mail address would be great, but not any more. I switched to an address that, while easy to say and tell people, it's very unusual and it's very unlikely someone else would ever come up with it.

logbiscuitswave 3y ago
My Gmail account is the same way. I constantly get people using it as a throwaway email address for various dating sites, commerce sites, and porn sites. After enough annoying emails, I’ll typically change the account’s password or delete it if I can. (These sites usually aren’t the most reputable, so often times about the most I can do is change the password to lock them out.) I don’t get why people do this. It’s not like it’s difficult to get a throwaway email account.
ChildOfChaos 3y ago
I have a simple@Gmail.com address and I have this problem quite a lot, were i get a lot of random stuff. Sometimes from the same person, there starbucks card seems to be linked to it for example. Annoying.
- jcpham2 3y ago
  I took was an early adopter of gmail and I imagine a person could guess what my email address is, especially if I said I keep forgetting my HN passwords. Misplaced periods give me all sorts of other people's emails - new cars, new mortgages, new bank accounts, new home purchases that are not in my name or identity (based on the names I understand the confusion) - all sorts of things that I'm not doing IRL. Sometimes I try to reach out to the sender and get them to correct the email address, sometimes I just unsubscribe
- Johnny555 3y ago
  Same, I get a lot of sensitive correspondence, things like divorce settlements from lawyers, mortgage applications, correspondence with doctors with a lot of personal details (that the person cc’ed me on), airline reservations, etc. Usually I’ll reply to the sender and tell them they have the wrong email address, some don’t believe me, sometimes they ask me if I know the person (out of a billion gmail users), some complain that I took to long to tell them about the wrong address, and sometimes a lawyer will direct me to delete all copies of the errant email… I always reply back to tell them that the email lands on multiple devices and is downloaded and backed up automatically and to see if they want to pay me on a time and materials basis or if they want a project based fee. None have been willing to pay me to cleanup their mistake. Way back when I signed up with gmail, I was happy to get a first-initial.lastname@gmail.com address, now I wish I’d gone with something more obscure.
  - gsharma 3y ago
    Same situation here! My HN Username @gmail and my last name is a very common last name in India. I’ve received people’s tax returns (including their SSN), airline tickets and hotel reservations, matrimonial proposals, photographs, etc. I often used to email back and let people know about the mistake, but rarely do it now unless there is sensitive/urgent information. To deal with some of the repeated unwanted emails, I have rules created to label those emails with a specific label. I use Google scripts to auto-delete all emails from that label which are older than 365 days. It cleans up repeated transaction emails from Indian banks/credit cards, newsletters, etc. but also gives me a year to retrieve the email if it was actually meant for me.
- pintxo 3y ago
  Same, got me a free month of Disney+ once.
gigel82 3y ago
I get the same with <common_name>@outlook.com ; managed to sign up right as the service was launched and thought I scored :) After a couple of years gave up on that address as it was getting dozens of messages a day (a lot of them legit email, sent to the wrong address - including bank statements, shipping orders, etc.)
MarkSweep 3y ago
firstname.lastname@gmail.com can have similar problems. Somehow people miscommunicate or misremember their email address and I get a lot of misdirected messages.
- MrMember 3y ago
  I have firstinitiallastname@gmail.com and I get a lot of stuff meant for other people. Someone even used it to sign up for their bank, and said bank apparently didn't require verifying the email address. I don't even have that common of a name.
- HelloNurse 3y ago
  I'm in the firstname.lastname@gmail.com club too (common first name and very common surname) and I receive so many mistaken emails that I like to collate them to guess which homonyms are the same person. I often see repeated attempts to create accounts without reconsidering the email address, and sometimes they succeed (I received repeated invoices for Sky and for an insurance, not to mention occasional ones).
- unregistereddev 3y ago
  I have firstInitial.lastName@gmail.com and have occasional problems with this as well, despite having a very uncommon last name.
- matthiaswh 3y ago
  Now imagine how bad it is for the guy with the verbatim email address `firstname.lastname@gmail.com`.
  - Arrath 3y ago
    Oh wow, I'd never even considered that.
- ShellfishMeme 3y ago
  Same thing here. The worst part is when websites don't actually require an email confirmation to keep using them. In the beginning I've tried to reach out to those companies to close the accounts without accessing them but by now I've started just resetting the password and then deleting them. It's just too difficult to do the right thing.
obscur 3y ago
How is this related to the topic?
- chriscjcj 3y ago
  While not entirely on topic, I am implying that the person who is getting the unremitting password reset requests may have an e-mail address with a similar problem. My <common-name>@<common-name>.com address gets incessant password reset requests for every major online site in existence. (I should have been clearer about this; sorry.) I am suggesting that, by having strange or very unique e-mail address, you can fairly effectively mitigate this phenomenon.
kstrauser 3y ago
Way back when, I got a Yahoo email like <HN_username>@yahoo.com. My last name isn’t unique, but it’s not exactly Smith. It’s amazing how many other people have mistyped it. To this day, I still get emails meant for other people. I keep that old account for 2 purposes: 1. It amuses me. I log in and clear it out once a year or so. 2. At various times I’ve had coworkers who didn’t believe it was common for people to enter someone else’s email address when registering for a sensitive system. When that happens, I’ve taken them to my old Yahoo webmail. Oh look, another kstrauser’s loan paperwork! I can only imagine what that’d be like if it were at Gmail and not Yahoo.
ActionHank 3y ago
Finally found the person behind test@test.com!
- slowhand09 3y ago
  How about dotdotat@dot.dot.com?
kentonv 3y ago
Mine is temporal at gmail. "Temporal" was my teenage gamer tag which I mostly stopped using decades ago, but it's been my gmail address for almost 20 years and changing it is not easy. The problem is, "temporal" happens to mean "temporary" in Spanish. As soon as Gmail became popular in the Spanish-speaking world, people started using it as a placeholder address. * Lots of people use it when creating throw-away accounts. * Sometimes companies use it as a placeholder when they don't know a customer's address. Multiple telecom companies in various countries have done this to me, sometimes populating hundreds of customers' accounts with my email address, such that I receive all of their phone bills, sometimes even with detailed call logs. * All kinds of students register for university classes using my address resulting in me getting tons of emails from professors. In many cases I could go drop their classes for them if I were evil enough. * Once a Colombian school gave my address admin access on their school-wide Zoom organization. The really annoying part about this is that Zoom didn't give me any way in the UI to leave the organization, so my account was attached to this school until I complained on Twitter and someone silently fixed it. * For the last couple months, someone has been scraping Shopify-backed web shops, entering my email address when prompted, putting things in their cart, and then abandoning it, such that I receive an email saying "Hey you left this thing in your cart! Do you still want to buy it?" The emails are always in Spanish, of course. I receive them from like 50 different web sites every day. (Luckily I was able to create a filter for certain Spanish words...) None of this stuff gets filtered as spam because it does not look like spam to gmail's filters. I have learned it's more productive to block addresses than to mark spam, but this annoyingly takes four clicks per email. I have begged Google to give me a way to filter by language but of course no one is listening. WIRED even wrote an article about it: https://www.wired.com/story/misplaced-emails-took-over-inbox-temporal/ https://www.wired.com/story/misplaced-emails-took-over-inbox... I know, I know, I need to change my email address and probably get off Gmail altogether. It's difficult because I have 20 years of history built around this address.
- k12sosse 3y ago
  I'm sure having it spelled out verbatim in an article online helped cut the emails per second down ;)
Angostura 3y ago
Hi Bob
cryptoegorophy 3y ago
I treat giving out my email as giving out the social security number. I wish HideMyEmail feature from iOS came in 15 years ago.
thrill 3y ago
nobody@nowhere.com was my go-to throwaway email address - sorry about that.
hellojesus 3y ago
Lol I always use cat@cat.com, so to whomever owns that: you're welcome.
yencabulator 3y ago
There's an idiot sharing my first & last name who never remembers to put his middle initial in his email address, and as a result I see he's an alcoholic, has financial trouble, keeps applying for artist grants, has a social sciences degree of some sort, is involved in local politics, and so on. I could also choose to pwn his online betting, games, dating, and porn accounts any moment I want. I may or may not have changed his gender preferences on a dating site...
- JohnMakin 3y ago
  How? If his email is something like johnWsmith@gmail.com and he's accidentally entering johnsmith@gmail.com (you), how is he ever able to register? If he's sending password reset requests to the wrong address (yours) - wouldn't every site in existence realize that's not the registered account and the email would never end up in your inbox?
  - yencabulator 3y ago
    He has john.w.smith and is repeatedly typing in john.smith, and also hands it out to humans who then want to contact me about his things. Apparently for many sites, user retention & money are more important than verifying an email address up front. He visits the scummiest betting and dating sites, so I'm not very surprised.
    - worthless-trash 3y ago
      I'm getting similar behavior from another user with the same pattern. I also get their college results, government assistance, a payday loan company, pinterest and subscriptions to newsletters sent to me for them. Ive mailed them directly, multiple times but they dont seem to care. I'm now returning the favor, signing them up for all the crappy sites when i need a throwaway.
  - Tagbert 3y ago
    A surprisingly large number of sites will let you register without requiring an email verification. I continually get a lot of emails, sometimes with private information to first name.lastname@gmail.com where people with my same name just use that without caring that it is not their email address. You probably aren't getting that job offer and you probably aren't getting that bank load approved without being able to see the emails. For a while I tried to notify the senders but they rarely reacted or even provided a way to contact them. Now I worry about it becoming a scam vector so I just delete them.
y-c-o-m-b 3y ago
If you are bob@gmail.com or bob@yahoo.com, I am sorry about the decades worth of product offers, porn subscription offers, forum or blog reply notifications, etc.
- takinola 3y ago
  I use bob@smith.com for any service that insists on an email address when they have no business doing so (eg public WiFi portals). I used to use bob@example.com to avoid spamming poor Bob but many services now disallow example.com as a domain. Sorry Bob!
  - znpy 3y ago
    I usually use marketin@domain-of-the-website.tld when a website insists on an email address to let me download something. I also curse at the marketing team, just in case.
    - epiccoleman 3y ago
      Oh my God, that's brilliant.
    - callalex 3y ago
      I guess I’m more evil, I use abuse@ whatever site because I know that’s guaranteed to be monitored.
  - epiccoleman 3y ago
    I usually use fuckoff@mailinator.com, which usually works (some sites won't let you use a mailinator address).
- secabeen 3y ago
  Gmail launched with a minimum username length of 6 characters, so no one has ever had bob@gmail.com.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
qingcharles 3y ago
Reminds me of the time I changed my main cellphone number so the last digits were 69696969. It was a really, really bad idea that sounded funny in my head. That number is scrawled on every toilet wall with "for a good time call: ..." Every hour of the night...! See also: https://www.wired.com/1998/09/woz/ https://www.wired.com/1998/09/woz/
neuronflux 3y ago
My email is <first initial><last name>. I also have the same first initial as my father, sometimes I get email intended for him. Fortunately our last name is unusual so that's about the extent of it.
m463 3y ago
sounds like the woz story, where he got a common phone number like 888-8888. but he would get calls all day from babies. EDIT: https://www.wired.com/1998/09/woz/ https://www.wired.com/1998/09/woz/ (a large article, search for 888-8888)
znpy 3y ago
You don’t need a custom domain, a gmail address is enough. I have surname.name@gmail.com and I routinely used to receive emails for surnamename@gmail.com, because of some moron at google that though it was a good idea to ignore dots. I haven’t checked that gmail account in a while (gmail is just trash at this point, beyond salvage) but I might still be receiving this guy’s loans solicitation or his car insurance certificates. Who knows.
rufus_foreman 3y ago
At least with email you can change your address. I once had a process server come to my door to serve a summons, it was my first and last name with a different middle initial. When I pointed that out to the process server, he said "close enough" and walked away. I had never been served a summons before so I was worried about it, I called a lawyer and the lawyer said to just throw the summons in the trash. Although apparently the guy with the same name as me was going bankrupt or something, his bad debts started showing up on my credit report and I had to mail the reporting agencies to take them off, went on for a few years.
nikolay 3y ago
I often used fuck@you.com... but now you.com is active, so, sorry guys!
gorbypark 3y ago
I have a decently common first name and last name and was eventually able to snag the domain of my name (firstnameLastname.ca) and switched over most of various online accounts to use it. I'm not a big Twitter user, and when I went to log in Twitter for the first time in probably a year or two, I forgot that it was still using my gmail account. I couldn't remember my password, so I did a password reset, received the email, and reset my password. After looking around a bit, I realized this was not my account. It turned out the previous owner of firstnameLastname.ca also used firstname@firstnameLastname.ca I ended up making a twitter post basically saying "Hello, I think I accidentally stole your account. If this used to be your account, email me.". A few weeks later I got an email from a fellow with the same name as me, who used to live in Canada but had moved back to England. I was able to change the email on the account and give him back access.

logbiscuitswave 3y ago

My Gmail account is the same way. I constantly get people using it as a throwaway email address for various dating sites, commerce sites, and porn sites. After enough annoying emails, I’ll typically change the account’s password or delete it if I can. (These sites usually aren’t the most reputable, so often times about the most I can do is change the password to lock them out.) I don’t get why people do this. It’s not like it’s difficult to get a throwaway email account.

ChildOfChaos 3y ago

I have a simple@Gmail.com address and I have this problem quite a lot, were i get a lot of random stuff. Sometimes from the same person, there starbucks card seems to be linked to it for example. Annoying.

jcpham2 3y ago
I took was an early adopter of gmail and I imagine a person could guess what my email address is, especially if I said I keep forgetting my HN passwords. Misplaced periods give me all sorts of other people's emails - new cars, new mortgages, new bank accounts, new home purchases that are not in my name or identity (based on the names I understand the confusion) - all sorts of things that I'm not doing IRL. Sometimes I try to reach out to the sender and get them to correct the email address, sometimes I just unsubscribe
Johnny555 3y ago
Same, I get a lot of sensitive correspondence, things like divorce settlements from lawyers, mortgage applications, correspondence with doctors with a lot of personal details (that the person cc’ed me on), airline reservations, etc. Usually I’ll reply to the sender and tell them they have the wrong email address, some don’t believe me, sometimes they ask me if I know the person (out of a billion gmail users), some complain that I took to long to tell them about the wrong address, and sometimes a lawyer will direct me to delete all copies of the errant email… I always reply back to tell them that the email lands on multiple devices and is downloaded and backed up automatically and to see if they want to pay me on a time and materials basis or if they want a project based fee. None have been willing to pay me to cleanup their mistake. Way back when I signed up with gmail, I was happy to get a first-initial.lastname@gmail.com address, now I wish I’d gone with something more obscure.
- gsharma 3y ago
  Same situation here! My HN Username @gmail and my last name is a very common last name in India. I’ve received people’s tax returns (including their SSN), airline tickets and hotel reservations, matrimonial proposals, photographs, etc. I often used to email back and let people know about the mistake, but rarely do it now unless there is sensitive/urgent information. To deal with some of the repeated unwanted emails, I have rules created to label those emails with a specific label. I use Google scripts to auto-delete all emails from that label which are older than 365 days. It cleans up repeated transaction emails from Indian banks/credit cards, newsletters, etc. but also gives me a year to retrieve the email if it was actually meant for me.
pintxo 3y ago
Same, got me a free month of Disney+ once.

gigel82 3y ago

I get the same with <common_name>@outlook.com ; managed to sign up right as the service was launched and thought I scored :) After a couple of years gave up on that address as it was getting dozens of messages a day (a lot of them legit email, sent to the wrong address - including bank statements, shipping orders, etc.)

MarkSweep 3y ago

firstname.lastname@gmail.com can have similar problems. Somehow people miscommunicate or misremember their email address and I get a lot of misdirected messages.

MrMember 3y ago
I have firstinitiallastname@gmail.com and I get a lot of stuff meant for other people. Someone even used it to sign up for their bank, and said bank apparently didn't require verifying the email address. I don't even have that common of a name.
HelloNurse 3y ago
I'm in the firstname.lastname@gmail.com club too (common first name and very common surname) and I receive so many mistaken emails that I like to collate them to guess which homonyms are the same person. I often see repeated attempts to create accounts without reconsidering the email address, and sometimes they succeed (I received repeated invoices for Sky and for an insurance, not to mention occasional ones).
unregistereddev 3y ago
I have firstInitial.lastName@gmail.com and have occasional problems with this as well, despite having a very uncommon last name.
matthiaswh 3y ago
Now imagine how bad it is for the guy with the verbatim email address `firstname.lastname@gmail.com`.
- Arrath 3y ago
  Oh wow, I'd never even considered that.
ShellfishMeme 3y ago
Same thing here. The worst part is when websites don't actually require an email confirmation to keep using them. In the beginning I've tried to reach out to those companies to close the accounts without accessing them but by now I've started just resetting the password and then deleting them. It's just too difficult to do the right thing.

obscur 3y ago

How is this related to the topic?

chriscjcj 3y ago
While not entirely on topic, I am implying that the person who is getting the unremitting password reset requests may have an e-mail address with a similar problem. My <common-name>@<common-name>.com address gets incessant password reset requests for every major online site in existence. (I should have been clearer about this; sorry.) I am suggesting that, by having strange or very unique e-mail address, you can fairly effectively mitigate this phenomenon.

kstrauser 3y ago

Way back when, I got a Yahoo email like <HN_username>@yahoo.com. My last name isn’t unique, but it’s not exactly Smith. It’s amazing how many other people have mistyped it. To this day, I still get emails meant for other people. I keep that old account for 2 purposes: 1. It amuses me. I log in and clear it out once a year or so. 2. At various times I’ve had coworkers who didn’t believe it was common for people to enter someone else’s email address when registering for a sensitive system. When that happens, I’ve taken them to my old Yahoo webmail. Oh look, another kstrauser’s loan paperwork! I can only imagine what that’d be like if it were at Gmail and not Yahoo.

ActionHank 3y ago

Finally found the person behind test@test.com!

slowhand09 3y ago
How about dotdotat@dot.dot.com?

kentonv 3y ago

Mine is temporal at gmail. "Temporal" was my teenage gamer tag which I mostly stopped using decades ago, but it's been my gmail address for almost 20 years and changing it is not easy. The problem is, "temporal" happens to mean "temporary" in Spanish. As soon as Gmail became popular in the Spanish-speaking world, people started using it as a placeholder address. * Lots of people use it when creating throw-away accounts. * Sometimes companies use it as a placeholder when they don't know a customer's address. Multiple telecom companies in various countries have done this to me, sometimes populating hundreds of customers' accounts with my email address, such that I receive all of their phone bills, sometimes even with detailed call logs. * All kinds of students register for university classes using my address resulting in me getting tons of emails from professors. In many cases I could go drop their classes for them if I were evil enough. * Once a Colombian school gave my address admin access on their school-wide Zoom organization. The really annoying part about this is that Zoom didn't give me any way in the UI to leave the organization, so my account was attached to this school until I complained on Twitter and someone silently fixed it. * For the last couple months, someone has been scraping Shopify-backed web shops, entering my email address when prompted, putting things in their cart, and then abandoning it, such that I receive an email saying "Hey you left this thing in your cart! Do you still want to buy it?" The emails are always in Spanish, of course. I receive them from like 50 different web sites every day. (Luckily I was able to create a filter for certain Spanish words...) None of this stuff gets filtered as spam because it does not look like spam to gmail's filters. I have learned it's more productive to block addresses than to mark spam, but this annoyingly takes four clicks per email. I have begged Google to give me a way to filter by language but of course no one is listening. WIRED even wrote an article about it: https://www.wired.com/story/misplaced-emails-took-over-inbox-temporal/ https://www.wired.com/story/misplaced-emails-took-over-inbox... I know, I know, I need to change my email address and probably get off Gmail altogether. It's difficult because I have 20 years of history built around this address.

k12sosse 3y ago
I'm sure having it spelled out verbatim in an article online helped cut the emails per second down ;)

Angostura 3y ago

Hi Bob

cryptoegorophy 3y ago

I treat giving out my email as giving out the social security number. I wish HideMyEmail feature from iOS came in 15 years ago.

thrill 3y ago

nobody@nowhere.com was my go-to throwaway email address - sorry about that.

hellojesus 3y ago

Lol I always use cat@cat.com, so to whomever owns that: you're welcome.

yencabulator 3y ago

There's an idiot sharing my first & last name who never remembers to put his middle initial in his email address, and as a result I see he's an alcoholic, has financial trouble, keeps applying for artist grants, has a social sciences degree of some sort, is involved in local politics, and so on. I could also choose to pwn his online betting, games, dating, and porn accounts any moment I want. I may or may not have changed his gender preferences on a dating site...

JohnMakin 3y ago
How? If his email is something like johnWsmith@gmail.com and he's accidentally entering johnsmith@gmail.com (you), how is he ever able to register? If he's sending password reset requests to the wrong address (yours) - wouldn't every site in existence realize that's not the registered account and the email would never end up in your inbox?
- yencabulator 3y ago
  He has john.w.smith and is repeatedly typing in john.smith, and also hands it out to humans who then want to contact me about his things. Apparently for many sites, user retention & money are more important than verifying an email address up front. He visits the scummiest betting and dating sites, so I'm not very surprised.
  - worthless-trash 3y ago
    I'm getting similar behavior from another user with the same pattern. I also get their college results, government assistance, a payday loan company, pinterest and subscriptions to newsletters sent to me for them. Ive mailed them directly, multiple times but they dont seem to care. I'm now returning the favor, signing them up for all the crappy sites when i need a throwaway.
- Tagbert 3y ago
  A surprisingly large number of sites will let you register without requiring an email verification. I continually get a lot of emails, sometimes with private information to first name.lastname@gmail.com where people with my same name just use that without caring that it is not their email address. You probably aren't getting that job offer and you probably aren't getting that bank load approved without being able to see the emails. For a while I tried to notify the senders but they rarely reacted or even provided a way to contact them. Now I worry about it becoming a scam vector so I just delete them.

y-c-o-m-b 3y ago

If you are bob@gmail.com or bob@yahoo.com, I am sorry about the decades worth of product offers, porn subscription offers, forum or blog reply notifications, etc.

takinola 3y ago
I use bob@smith.com for any service that insists on an email address when they have no business doing so (eg public WiFi portals). I used to use bob@example.com to avoid spamming poor Bob but many services now disallow example.com as a domain. Sorry Bob!
- znpy 3y ago
  I usually use marketin@domain-of-the-website.tld when a website insists on an email address to let me download something. I also curse at the marketing team, just in case.
  - epiccoleman 3y ago
    Oh my God, that's brilliant.
  - callalex 3y ago
    I guess I’m more evil, I use abuse@ whatever site because I know that’s guaranteed to be monitored.
- epiccoleman 3y ago
  I usually use fuckoff@mailinator.com, which usually works (some sites won't let you use a mailinator address).
secabeen 3y ago
Gmail launched with a minimum username length of 6 characters, so no one has ever had bob@gmail.com.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

qingcharles 3y ago

Reminds me of the time I changed my main cellphone number so the last digits were 69696969. It was a really, really bad idea that sounded funny in my head. That number is scrawled on every toilet wall with "for a good time call: ..." Every hour of the night...! See also: https://www.wired.com/1998/09/woz/ https://www.wired.com/1998/09/woz/

neuronflux 3y ago

My email is <first initial><last name>. I also have the same first initial as my father, sometimes I get email intended for him. Fortunately our last name is unusual so that's about the extent of it.

m463 3y ago

sounds like the woz story, where he got a common phone number like 888-8888. but he would get calls all day from babies. EDIT: https://www.wired.com/1998/09/woz/ https://www.wired.com/1998/09/woz/ (a large article, search for 888-8888)

znpy 3y ago

You don’t need a custom domain, a gmail address is enough. I have surname.name@gmail.com and I routinely used to receive emails for surnamename@gmail.com, because of some moron at google that though it was a good idea to ignore dots. I haven’t checked that gmail account in a while (gmail is just trash at this point, beyond salvage) but I might still be receiving this guy’s loans solicitation or his car insurance certificates. Who knows.

rufus_foreman 3y ago

At least with email you can change your address. I once had a process server come to my door to serve a summons, it was my first and last name with a different middle initial. When I pointed that out to the process server, he said "close enough" and walked away. I had never been served a summons before so I was worried about it, I called a lawyer and the lawyer said to just throw the summons in the trash. Although apparently the guy with the same name as me was going bankrupt or something, his bad debts started showing up on my credit report and I had to mail the reporting agencies to take them off, went on for a few years.

nikolay 3y ago

I often used fuck@you.com... but now you.com is active, so, sorry guys!

gorbypark 3y ago

I have a decently common first name and last name and was eventually able to snag the domain of my name (firstnameLastname.ca) and switched over most of various online accounts to use it. I'm not a big Twitter user, and when I went to log in Twitter for the first time in probably a year or two, I forgot that it was still using my gmail account. I couldn't remember my password, so I did a password reset, received the email, and reset my password. After looking around a bit, I realized this was not my account. It turned out the previous owner of firstnameLastname.ca also used firstname@firstnameLastname.ca I ended up making a twitter post basically saying "Hello, I think I accidentally stole your account. If this used to be your account, email me.". A few weeks later I got an email from a fellow with the same name as me, who used to live in Canada but had moved back to England. I was able to change the email on the account and give him back access.