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At Google your username appears everywhere. In mail, code reviews, chat, irc - everywhere. I know some of my colleagues by their username only, I don't even rem
by enneff 14y ago
At Google your username appears everywhere. In mail, code reviews, chat, irc - everywhere. I know some of my colleagues by their username only, I don't even remember their real names.
When we start we get to specify three usernames in order of preference. You are given the first one that is available. It means a lot to me to be adg@google.com.
- joshu 14y agodo you really want your raw email available publically?
- Kylekramer 14y agoA good test of Gmail filtering abilities, I suppose.
- dangrossman 14y agoI've been posting my e-mail addresses in plaintext all over the web for a good decade and a half. I still use those same addresses. I see no spam. Spam filters work. Why are people afraid of having their e-mail address out there without obfuscation?
- hollerith 14y agoBack when Usenet and mailing lists were the medium for most of the important conversations on the internet (that is, before 1994 or 1995) if you tried to post to Usenet or a mailing list with an obfuscated email address, people would complain (in replies to your post) if the admins running Usenet or the mailing list let your post through at all.
- DanBC 14y agoThis was enforced with various levels of strictness. DE usenet is still pretty strict about not allowed munged email addresses, and only allowing you to use an address that you have control of. Other bits of Usenet would tolerate carefully munged From headers, but insist on empty or real Reply-to headers. (Reply to wasn't returned in a simple header retrieval, meaning it wasn't as often scraped. And it was optional. So either have it real, or don't have it at all.) Other bits didn't care what you did. Since poorly munged email addresses could cause considerable amounts of spam to be sent to that address it's fair enough to remind people not to inadvertently use another person's real email address. email filters then were not great; email addresses were scraped; downloading a lot of headers over lousy dial-up was annoying; and huge mailboxes was rare.
- joshu 14y agoI get a boatload of spam daily. On gmail.
- pbreit 14y agoDid you turn off or otherwise adjust spam filtering? Otherwise, I don't believe you. At my last job (large, successful startup) I got the wildcard mail and got close to zero spam. Gmail spam filtering definitely works very well.
- dmd 14y agoInsanely well. I've been posting publicly as dmd@3e.org for 16 years now, and at a few other addresses that forward to that for 22. All of that mail goes to gmail. My spam folder gets ~600 messages per day. I get a false-negative (spam in inbox) about once a month. I check for false-positives (ham in spambox) pretty regularly, but haven't ever found one.
- Aethaeryn 14y agoI use Gmail, but I definitely get spam. I get false-positive spam all of the time (mailing lists I'm on have a decent chance of going to the spam box), and whenever a spammer has 'Google' in the email title, it has about a 60% chance of being a false-negative (i.e. showing up in the inbox). I also get false-negatives on spam when there is just a title and message body. Perhaps Gmail's spam filters are mostly based on how you train them, so people who receive more email get a better filter?
- joshu 14y agoNope. I don't mess with it. I am using GAFYD though.
- hollerith 14y agoVery interesting! I wonder if spammers steer clear of @gmail.com addresses to prevent Google's algorithms from learning about their spam. (If so, they probably want to steer clear of GAFYD addresses, too, but maybe they don't know how to identify them).
- nickgeiger 14y agoI also remember reading a while back that trying to disguise your email with the "username (at) gmail (dot) com" approach is worse than just putting the raw email out there because it's not only just as easy to sniff out on the page, but you can also search for it in search engines: try searching for "at gmail dot com" vs "@gmail.com" in various search engines edit: source: http://varenhor.st/2010/01/email-at-domain-dot-com-is-making-a-spammers-job-easier/ http://varenhor.st/2010/01/email-at-domain-dot-com-is-making...
- jiggy2011 14y agoYes , interestingly enough the first assignment on the stanford NLP online course is too write an email harvester that finds those email addresses.
- enneff 14y agoI don't care.
- pbreit 14y agoIt's really not that big of a deal. More people should do it, especially constituent-friendly people.
- malkia 14y agoInteresting... Considering Google+ at some point did not allow nicknames.
- tedunangst 14y agokind of different, considering gmail has always allowed nicknames. you'd have a point if google let you pick the name on your paycheck.
- jarek 14y agoDoes gmail allow general public to register usernames that are less than six characters now?