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A friend of mine has a relatively common first name and last name, and she regularly gets mail that is clearly not meant for her. She started a Facebook group f
by bertil 11mo ago
A friend of mine has a relatively common first name and last name, and she regularly gets mail that is clearly not meant for her. She started a Facebook group for homonyms to help her route mail, and it now have a hundred members and have helped people get important documents.
At some point, they even organized an impersonation because someone needed to retrieve an official document and couldn’t be there in person. Another member nearby offered to go and get it. “Won’t you need my ID for that? — Oh, I have one with just the right name…”
- mywacaday 11mo agoI'm Irish and have a common firstname.lastname@gmail.com At some point the head of a national hospital thought he had that address and wasn't using his official email for everything, I got several emails that should not have been for me and some were quiet sensitive, I always emailed back the sender to let them know and eventually I emailed his secretary as it kept happening. I've also received purchase order confirmations from Australia, building contracts from Canada, HR emails from a university to which I had to confirm I had deleted the mail as letting them know led to GDPR investigation
- baubino 11mo agoI’m in the midst of a similar situation. My firstinitial.lastname email keeps getting very sensitive legal documents from law firms handling the case of someone who does not seem to know what their actual email address is. I called the firm and told them they needed to have an in-person meeting with their client and get a correct email address from them. That seemed to help for a few months. But now I’m getting emails again from a different law firm.
- catoc 11mo agoLaw firms that send very sensitive legal documents over email… #sigh I’d switch firms immediately if that’s their level of opsec awareness
- eru 11mo agoWhat are you talking about? If you send emails from eg GMail to Gmail, it's fairly secure.
- catoc 11mo agoEven if the law firm uses a Gmail account - which most of course don’t - Google still has access to your sensitive legal email content. (And that’s apart from the meta data leaking)
- basilgohar 11mo agoGmail can be fetched via IMAP and leave Gmail's infra entirely. And I don't think Google guarantees that their implementation stays fully on their own owned infra. It's a reasonable assumption but I'd never trust that for a security guarantee. Email is not an end-to-end secure data protocol without the use of client side encryption/decryption like PGP/GPG, but even then, sender/receiver and time are all in the envelop metadata.
- catoc 11mo agoYeah, that exactly my point - no idea why I’m being downvoted on this
- giancarlostoro 11mo agoProbably because Law Firms arent necessarily computer security firms. Lots of people have terrible op sec. Additionally if you the recipient are on gmail it stops mattering, now Google knows your legal woes.
- catoc 11mo agoExactly, I’d never use Gmail for anything sensitive. Even for just personal emails I use my own mailserver. (And again, for truly sensitive stuff I don’t use email at all)
- rkomorn 11mo agoMy spouse suffers from this as well. It's bananas to me how many people use that email address clearly thinking it's theirs.
- bonzini 11mo agoI have myname.wifename@gmail.com (we use it for bills, children activities, and other family stuff where you can't register more than one email address). Neither of our names can be confused with a last name and yet I had multiple people writing to it incorrectly, including: as the email attached to a Diners credit card (I called Diners and they asked me what's the right one and "if I don't know the right one how do I know that it's wrong"), as the email for a school 400 km from home (another family must have had the same idea), once for some lawyer stuff (I then learnt that about 100 people in Italy do have my wife's name as a very uncommon last name), and lately as the recovery email for another Google account.
- rkomorn 11mo agoWhat a weird world. :) Edit: side note, your username is also the name of my favorite fusball table maker.
- bonzini 11mo agoYES! I have no idea if we're related, but imagine the surprise when you "first get internet at home", and my father and I decided to search our surname on Altavista, and we found foosball tables and tournaments!
- rkomorn 11mo agoDamn it I was hoping you were going to reply "that's my family!" :D
- citizenkeen 11mo agoYour use case is why I bought my own domain name. My wife and I create shared aliases we can both send from. It’s made spousal ensuing with schools so much easier, etc.
- mcv 11mo agoThere are several people with my name at the company I work for. I frequently get email meant for someone else. Worst was at another company where a person with the same name has just left, so they gave me that email address. Turned out he was subscribed to several Confluence pages for which I now received updates. But I didn't get his Confluence account, so I couldn't unsubscribe from those updates.
- cogogo 11mo agoI have a canonical gmail address for what I thought was not such a common name pair. I get so much sensitive stuff. I used to email the sender but I have given up. One of them runs a business and the businesses that interact with his business just keep emailing me. Or stop for a couple of years, change personnel and start right back up.
- heffer 11mo agoSame here. My Google Account is something along the lines of jose86@gmail.com (a common hispanic first name + birth year; I'm German). It's unusable. I have received full blown mortgage applications from couples in Mexico (including paystubs, tax forms, credit ratings, phone bills, passports). Mostly, these days, it's transaction notifications for a guy in Nigeria and phone bills for people in South America.
- MaxBarraclough 11mo ago> I'm Irish and have a common firstname.lastname@gmail.com At the risk of nitpicking, @gmail.com email addresses use a dots don't matter policy [0] so really you have a common firstnamelastname@gmail.com and are free to add dots wherever you like. [0] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150
- fn-mote 11mo agoRecently learned, to my surprise, that other major providers have not followed Google’s lead on this, so there are plenty of places dont.scam..me@ is a valid email (social engineering or typosquatting).
- zukzuk 11mo agoI have a relatively rare name — I’ve actually never met anyone with my last name, never mind someone with my full name — and this happens to me regularly. Last week I got a job rejection from New Zealand post, for a while I was getting someone’s pay stub notifications from the US, etc. I suspect it’s because I was the first to register the first.last@gmail.com address for my name. I guess it’s a bit like owning a simple noun .com domain.
- donohoe 11mo agoI use my lastname [at] gmail (same as my HN username). Over the years, I’ve received all sorts of misdirected messages: medical, financial, support, even real estate documents. When it seems important, I do my best to contact the sender and let them know. What I’ve learned is that “no-reply” email addresses can cause real harm in situations where it’s critical to reach an actual person.
- unangst 11mo agoSame boat. Obscure last name humans unite!
- abustamam 11mo agoMy dad's first name is my last name so my last name @gmail is taken by him :) But I have a relatively rare first name and even rarer last name due to my dad having a very rare first name, so I easily snagged first.last. Pretty sure to this day I've never even seen anyone with my dad's first name (or my last name). Meanwhile, my coworkers name is literally Adam Smith and his usernames tend to be adamsmith2 or 3 or 4. I once worked at a place that has two Brian Smiths who worked at desks across from each other. That was quite bizarre.
- tracker1 11mo agoI've worked in a few groups over the years with several other "Michael"... It's not fun when you get 4 in a group (dev/mgt teams) of like 15.
- 11mo ago
- torben-friis 11mo agoMy name isn’t super known, but it happened to be the same as that of a very big fish in the financial institution I worked for. Thankfully these people were working mostly through physical meetings and calls, so no sensitive info was leaked, but I did get calendar invites to discuss the future of entire countries as an engineering intern. I used the name a couple times to set up our internal meetings in the fancier upper floors, so we could have whiteboard discussions over a fancy hardwoods table. No one questioned the name appearing in the entrance display as the current user.
- stareatgoats 11mo ago[flagged]
- torben-friis 11mo agoDiscuss it as in “there’s elections in Argentina, let’s see how we react to the change of administration”. Not as in “I will replace Argentina’s president”. At least the titles/descriptions didn’t contain anything to consider pulling a Snowden about it.
- Atlas667 11mo ago[flagged]
- ben_w 11mo agoThat's what they said, isn't it? Just because some people accidentally invite journalists into Signal meetings to discuss active bombing campaigns, doesn't mean everyone running a financial institution is vying to be named the next President of Argentina.
- aatd86 11mo agoNah, it is probably just about rebalancing the portfolio in prevision of the bond market acting up... this is not MKUltra yet. ;D
- Yetino 11mo agoThe other end of the spectrum has its own problems too. My first and last names are both quite rare — deliberately so, thanks to my parents. That means when someone, say a potential employer, googles my name, it’s reasonable for them to assume every result they see is about me. For a while, I actually liked that. It felt like having a unique identity online. Until one day I discovered someone else had created a YouTube channel under the exact same name. Presumably they happen to share this unusual combination legitimately — but the content on that channel wasn’t exactly what I’d want showing up when someone searches for me. I tried to “correct the record” by setting up my own channel, just to add some better signals. But since YouTube isn’t my thing, my videos barely register, and Google still insists on showing the other person’s channel first.
- eru 11mo agoI wonder if I'm accidentally doing that to someone. My complete name is rare, but I share it with a journalist who's quite a bit older than me.
- reactordev 11mo agoThis is why actors and musicians use stage names.
- eru 11mo agoUsing a stage name doesn't protect you from someone else coming along later and sharing the same name (as your stage name). If you are famous enough, people might even deliberately name their kids after you.
- reactordev 11mo agoHere you can trademark the name and sue anyone who uses it…
- fortran77 11mo agoMy firstname / lastname isn’t common but if you google it you get a disbarred attorney with the same name. I’ve been asked on interviews about being disbarred; I know then that someone at the company is a sloppy “researcher”.
- reactordev 11mo agoI did a similar thing during lockdown Covid era. Got online and rounded up everyone with the same name as me as we all decided not to tarnish the name, to build respect on the name, and each of us to excel in our fields. It was powerful. One’s a musician/DJ in buenos aries, the other a mechanical engineer for SpaceX, me - a software leader, another is a luthier making traditional folk instruments, and one is a writer across the pond in the EU. A few years later Tina Fey did those commercials where she pulled in other Tina Feys and we all messaged the group like “Hey! They did it too!”. I’m sure many others did it. The world is so connected now that you should reach out and learn about your “alter-egos”. Anyways, this reminded me of that and it’s nice to see other people have similar experiences being weird with, I guess themselves.
- mysterydip 11mo agoI once worked at a company whose lawyer shared the same first and last name. Rarely I would get an email and then a "please don't read that, delete immediately" afterwards.
- linohh 11mo agoThat is so incredibly smart. I have a very common gmail address (initial + last name) and literally hundreds of people use this mail address and I would love to resolve the countless issues I can witness from getting the mails alone, but I essentially have no chance at all.
- jacquesm 11mo ago> At some point, they even organized an impersonation because someone needed to retrieve an official document and couldn’t be there in person. Another member nearby offered to go and get it. “Won’t you need my ID for that? — Oh, I have one with just the right name…” That's a felony in many places.
- kingkawn 11mo agoShhh, snitch
- dahart 11mo agoIf it hypothetically was a crime, I wonder how often it would actually get prosecuted given someone used their real ID, showing the office failed to check anything other than a name known to have dupes, and/or given they had no intent to steal something and acted with knowledge and permission of the intended recipient, showing no malicious intent. I can imagine reasons those wouldn’t be considered a valid defense, but I guess it probably depends on what office & document & law we’re talking about.
- kid64 11mo agoObtaining something of value through deception is fraud.
- speckx 11mo agoI have a similar username on a "social media" site as the founder's username. I would get hateful personal messages, requests for favors, begging for money, etc., constantly. At first I would respond to correct people, but after years and years I stopped. I just disable notifications for that site and never read my mailbox, personal messages, etc. This has been going on for about 19 years now.
- dietr1ch 11mo agoIt's ridiculous that the US still runs on name matching when you could just have a public Id number (unlike the SSN that everyone needs to pretend it's secret).
- TheNewsIsHere 11mo agoWe still have to pretend SSNs are private until both law and common practice change. I expect that to be “functionally never”. Maybe within our lifetimes. Maybe. My SSN is out there several times over at this point, thanks to breaches at phone companies, insurance companies, CRAs, ISPs, and the rest. I stopped tracking breaches that included the kind of info you’d need to impersonate me, about six years ago. The list was long and it seemed to be a pointless exercise by then. I also have a mixed credit file with all major CRAs because of more than one person with the same name I have, one of whom lived in the same area. Even if I didn’t have freezes everywhere, over the phone KBAs stopped working years ago even with my SSN.
- wat10000 11mo agoThe most American approach would be for SSNs to become a de facto universal ID number that you have to give everywhere, while still continuing to function as an unchangeable password to all your most important things.
- TheNewsIsHere 11mo agoWe’re almost there!
- abhiyerra 11mo agoI have nickname@berkeley.edu as my alumni email address and I get a lot of interesting emails directed towards more important people…
- s0rce 11mo agoI have a common first initial and last name and that's my gmail and I get more email for other people than myself
- cbsmith 11mo agoI have this problem badly enough I was interviewed for this article: https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/workplace/work-colleague-same-name-2857edc4 https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/workplace/work-colleague-same-... You wouldn't believe some of the things that have shown up in my inbox.
- ChrisMarshallNY 11mo agoI had an Australian criminal defense attorney with my name, register the .au version of my personal domain. I used to get very sensitive documents sent to me. A lot of juvenile cases. I suspect people could have gone to jail for sharing it. It's really on the sender, to make sure, but it's still a nasty situation. It eventually stopped. I think they ended up registering a different domain name. I used to diligently respond, when sent erroneous documents, but never got a reply. I destroyed them, but there's no telling where other copies might have gone.
- sceptic123 11mo agoI have a relatively uncommon first name (for my age group) but a very common surname. The first person I met with the same first name as me was when I was about 13 — they also had the same surname.
- mrgaro 11mo agoI used to have a very common name (before getting married and took my wife's last name). Imagine that I have firstname.lastname@gmail and somebody was genius to take firstname.lastnam@gmail. I felt this was so stupid, that i quickly lost any willingness to try to relay the emails to their original owner, as the other person had zero interest to change their address to be harder to mistype.