

On the Perils of Owning a Vanity Username - benjlang
http://shahart.al/2013/07/13/on-the-perils-of-owning-a-vanity-username/#

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Casseres
I have a firstlast@gmail address, and I occasionally get e-mails intended for
people with the same name.

Recently, a person with the same first and last name thought he owned my
e-mail address. He signed up for several job searching e-mails from companies
that did not verify e-mail address (which I promptly marked as spam). That
person finally signed up for a FedEx.com account, and I was able to reset the
password to access and get his phone number. I called him up to inform him of
his error, and it sounded like the man was in his late 60s and thought I was
an "IBM-er". A week after that, he stopped signing up for new services with my
e-mail address. I can only guess a friend or family member told him how e-mail
works.

Side note: FedEx.com should know better than not forcing users to verify their
e-mail addresses at sign up.

~~~
Fuzzwah
Today I just paid $1.06 to facebook to finally allow me to send a message to
someone that didn't get filtered into their "other" inbox. I did this because
I'm sick to death of receiving their email.

We share a name. I created the account first.last@gmail.com, he created the
account firstlast@gmail.com. At some time in the past google decided that they
would just ignore dots in email addresses. Luckily during the merge I got to
keep the email address. So now first.last and firstlast come to me.

My doppelganger uses the email address for their apple id. I can reset their
password, but I don't get the password sent to me (as it sends the new pass to
the recovery email address).

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tjr
I have my first-initial, last-name at Gmail, and I guess a lot of other people
think they do too. I have been often mistaken for a guy who sells custom-made
night lights, a woman applying for jobs in the airline industry, another woman
in need of remedial driving education, and most comically, a member of local
government in a foreign country, which has generated a seemingly endless
stream of email for years.

I have contacted the senders to let them know of their mistake, but the same
people keep sending me mail intended for someone else. In some cases I've
given up. I can only imagine what the intended recipient is going through,
missing out on their job application notices, or council meeting updates.

~~~
Spooky23
I have a similar situation.

I get: email intended for an Irish bookie, videos of bus accidents from some
sort of investigator, some chick modelling underwear for a boyfriend, a
spreadsheet with the VPN and passwords for someone's employer, and a guy who
test drives luxury cars in Chicago and DC as a hobby.

It's really annoying!

~~~
autodidakto
Get creative and combine this info somehow.

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andrewflnr
Before you use a bogus gmail, or your own email, for testing, consider
mailinator.com . Anything@mailinator.com goes to a globally visible inbox.
It's pretty convenient.

