@siracusa the bane of having an early-ish GMail address

@siracusa One of my Gmail doppelgangers lives in the South of Wales. He stopped at the same Costa Coffee about once a month for 5 years. I eventually wrote him a postal letter to tell him that I didn't live anywhere near a a Costa Coffee (I'm in Alaska!), so all his reward points were going to waste, and would be happy to help him connect his account properly. Also, every time there was an email saying that they wanted feedback, I told Costa they should fix his email, and pasted in a history of the date, time, and location of every single previous visit. Never heard back in either case. From the Googles it seems very likely that he was in his '80s, I suspect it was his passing that caused the visits to stop. Now I kind of miss him.

@siracusa This!

I get ALL the emails because “Jay” sounds like “j” so I get ALL the jtorres@…emails. Also, the fact that dots don't matter with Gmail, I get all the jay.torres emails as well.

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150?hl=en&ref_topic=3394657

Reminds me of this: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/e-mail-addresses-it-would-be-really-annoying-to-give-out-over-the-phone

@siracusa I had three (!) different AT&T accounts using my Gmail address. I would receive their bills, purchase receipts, and random correspondence filled with PII. I’d call AT&T to have them stop, and they’d tell me they couldn’t contact a customer for privacy reasons. I’d argue they were knowingly violating their users' privacy, but they didn’t see it that way because the user entered my email address.

@siracusa I have firstname@outlook.com and it was too much of a hassle so I switched to a custom domain (firstname.jp) - I get zero spam and I attribute it to the uncommon TLD!

@siracusa I wish all Canadian banks had this feature so I wouldn’t have to know about Peter’s wire transfers.

@siracusa there’s an old guy in Cape Town ZA who is using my Gmail as his own. I am relentlessly informed in excruciating detail about everything he buys from Old Khaki, which seems to be a ZA version of The Gap.

@siracusa instagram hackers try to get into my 4 letter username account DAILY.

This super helpful email tells me I can ignore it.

@siracusa I have a rather common name for Germany and got the canonical firstname.lastname@gmail address. I now know from 3 dozen other people with my name. Everything across the board, school stuff, (repeated) communication from one‘s lawyer (who should get their license revoked over that, but well…), I think there was a citation, different invoices (for dentist‘s office software, from a tax bureau in Brussels, …), a few years back even from the US, I think there was a Walmart signup, some hotel stuff, and even an invitation to a fancy 70th or something birthday in posh LA. Oh and a slew of stream, PlayStation and whatever else online junk signups.

I stopped caring some years back when I explained in great detail to the parents of an alter-ego to get in touch with their son via phone or whatever as long as it’s not email. I got a new email a few days later where the parents explained to „their“ son that they got a pretty strange email…

@siracusa oh god I deal with this weekly

@siracusa Oh that's nice, I have this issue a lot with my very simple outlook account. It can be exhausting to undo all the sign ups. My email has been accidentally used to sign up for everything from christian political parties to obscure dating sites and even some purchase orders. Multiple times I've been forced to do a password reset and take over another persons account, because there is no other way to fix it. Even called some of them when their info was on orders etc.

@siracusa I’ve had my GMail since it launched and for over a decade someone keeps signing up for things with the same name, just without the dot between first and last name. Still comes to me. I know his name, he’s a pilot, and likes wine a lot. Slowly building a profile to hunt him down :)

@siracusa
1) oh joy, another gifted identity.
2) this wouldn't be an issue if companies bothered to verify an email address before using it.

@siracusa I have my first name at gmail. My favourite mails are all the Austrian food deliveries and the luxury hotels in Dubai. (Different people, I am sure.)

@siracusa I get so may of these. One from PayPal.ca and I can’t fix it because it requires a SSN to modify (probably a good idea for a financial site). But why explicit email verification isn’t required to create the account in the first place I don’t know.

@siracusa There's one guy from Brooklyn (currently living in Virginia) who has been misusing my Gmail account since about 2007. My theory is it got into his auto-complete prefs and keeps coming up. I have learned a disturbing amount about him. At one point I had his home address from a grocery receipt (he's gluten intolerant), and I considered mailing him to ask him to stop, but somehow that just seemed weird. He's since moved, and I don't have the new one (yet!)

@siracusa I have a guy who apparently gets lonely every 6 months and signs up for dating sites. Only one has ever actually validated emails and provided a simple opt-out.

I have found that he stops signing up for them for a while if I "forget" his password and reset it, and update his profile to say he is 7’3", has 38 dogs and a ferret, and is looking to exclusively date WWII veterans.

@siracusa Reddit does this, too, thankfully, so there aren’t 65 burner accounts under my catch-all domain.

I decided to keep the Instagram account that used my Gmail address: https://www.instagram.com/laa.monsta/.

@siracusa I wish Apple Brasil and Connecticut Water did the same.

@siracusa Nothing is so perfect™

@siracusa Instagram does that too, but any time I've ever clicked the link saying it's not my account, it gives me an error. There is a guy who had been trying to reset his account linked to a variation of my email for years.

@siracusa I have come to the conclusion that I made a poor choice for my email because I get this multiple times daily. And FYI Google has a “disavow account” link they include for this, too. It shows up when someone sets me up as a trusted email. Very nice.

@siracusa Instagram does that too, but any time I've ever clicked the link saying it's not my account, it gives me an error. There is a guy who had been trying to reset his account linked to a variation of my email without dots in the username for years.

@siracusa Best I can tell, there are at least 3 different people with my name that don't know what their email address is.

@siracusa What’s the better option than a “here” link?

@siracusa At my job I had many complaints because I DIDN'T use a "click here"