
Eighteen and Abandoned - footpath
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/04/eighteen-and-abandoned.html
======
lysol
When GMail came out, it was 2004 and the Iraq war was in full swing. I watched
the service launch into beta and then resigned myself to not receiving an
invite, until I received an invite at wil@wilwheaton.net, a domain I had been
squatting at the time, because it was hilarious. Hilarious, but that's another
story.

Anyway, I was an everyday, average idiot, receiving an exclusive invite to
what was sure the be the premier email service of all time. A gigabyte. Holy
fuck. That is such an inconceivable amount of storage, etc. It really is,
still. I've never come close to using even a measurable amount of it. Why even
have a limit? I'm digressing here. What a cool story.

Anyway, instead of registering my own name, which I did, I registered
hitler@gmail.com. To this day, it's basically radioactive. It receives an
absurd amount of spam, even withe GMail's fantastic filtering, and why would I
want to receive mail at hitler@gmail.com? If only I could ask my 22 year old
self, because I sure as hell don't remember why that was so hilarious. Kid
stuff. My very liberal girlfriend at the time didn't think it was very funny.

Every once in a while, I log into it, chuckle a little bit at some of the
things people have used the email address for (mostly forum signups and
Williams-Sonoma mailing list entries), and forget that I had registered the
address for another couple of years.

I think the thing is that it was an email service that was launched by an
already extant search provider, whereas before most email services had grown
organically, beating out the land rush for Hilarious Email Addresses. That
said, if anyone wants that email address, let me know. I'll take some fraction
of a bitcoin or something for it, you fucking anti-semite.

~~~
lysol
Just a correction that the email address I received it at was
wil@wilwheaton.org, not .net.

------
jkldotio
My gmail account has been suffering a similar problem in that someone uses it
for their throwaway signups for computer game forums and the like. Either that
or it's a very effective form of spam to pretend to be the "initial
registration" message, as by definition such email has to be the first
contact.

There is still much to be said for spam filtering though as it catches 5-10 a
day for me. Layer priority inbox on top of that and only checking mail when
you need to, not letting it interrupt you, and you can get some clarity.

I wonder if someone can come up with a proper paid competitor to gmail, it
would be something I would be interested in. What are the current
alternatives?

~~~
dangrossman
> I wonder if someone can come up with a proper paid competitor to gmail, it
> would be something I would be interested in. What are the current
> alternatives?

If you only do webmail, nobody else really compares. If you're OK with a
native client and IMAP/POP, then Rackspace Mail is #1. 100% uptime SLA, good
spam filtering, 24/7/365 phone/online support, big 25GB mailboxes, and just $2
per user.

~~~
epo
... per month.

------
anigbrowl
I feel like I'm trapped with some slightly drunk person at a cocktail party.

~~~
skore
Agreed. I sometimes wish slightly drunk people at cocktail parties would skip
to the next paragraph. Or skip to the last paragraph before I decide whether I
want to hear the ones in between.

------
mtrimpe
I'm not nearly as interested in the story of eighteen@gmail.com as I would be
in the story of john@doe.com. :)

~~~
Samuel_Michon
I believe that’s posted at <http://www.example.com/archive/johndoe.htm> ;)

------
bencoder
To whoever owns test@test.com, I apologise.

~~~
jes5199
a friend of mine had a web site that they were about to demo to a potential
client, and it had some CMS sort of capabilities, and they had filled it with
lorem-ipsum type content, and "fake" urls: they just typed in a bunch of Xs.
for example "xxxxx.xxx" ... of course, .xxx is a real TLD now, and all the x*
sites have been squatted by porn. They caught it 30 minutes before the demo -
my friend almost choking on his coffee when he absentmindedly clicked one of
the links - and they had to search and replace the whole database to be
"example.com" everywhere.

~~~
makomk
Interestingly, xxxxx.xxx hasn't just been squatted by some porn provider. It
appears to be owned and run by ICM Registry LLC, the registry for .xxx and the
company which convinced ICANN to allow them to run the TLD.

So basically, the company that lobbied for and created .xxx didn't just know
that people were going to squat xxxxx.xxx domain names used as placeholders,
they actually got in on the act themselves before anyone else could.

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ezequiel-garzon
Somewhat related, isn't it a sensible idea for Google to allow reusing deleted
accounts after "a reasonable" period? I can imagine good handles are becoming
increasingly rare.

On the other hand, I realize the 3.0 version of the web may end up doing away
with handles and URLs for all practical purposes...

~~~
dvdhsu
I don't think so. Hotmail used to have a similar "feature": when the email
address hadn't been logged in for 270 days, the account would be available
again [1]. This was troubling because if I had signed up for some other
service using my Hotmail address (say, a Gmail account) and didn't log in to
my Hotmail account for nine months, whoever wanted to compromise my other
account (Gmail, in this case) could sign up for Hotmail using my old username,
and initiate a password reset. The password reset would go to my Hotmail,
which no longer belongs to me.

Like it or not, email addresses are used to identify users on the web. This is
based on the assumption that an email's ownership doesn't change. Recycling
email addresses is dangerous given our reliance on emails as identification.

1\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotmail#Hotmail_Plus>

~~~
kijin
That reminds me of a paid Hotmail Plus account that I used to have, back in
2005 or so. I never renewed it because I finally got hold of a Gmail account
shortly afterward, but the address is apparently still active after 8 years
because every once in a while, I receive spam addressed to my old Hotmail
address (forwarded to my "old" Gmail address). Not only is the account active,
but even email forwarding (which were only available to paid users back then)
still appears to be working.

------
jasonhanley
My Gmail address gets all this same sort of stuff, except I use it actively,
and have to filter it out constantly.

I even wrote a blog post about it and have to send out the following canned
response at least once a day:

\--

Hi there,

You've reached the wrong email address. Please double-check and try again!

You may also want to read the following:
[http://blog.jasonhanley.com/2008/10/will-real-jhanley-
please...](http://blog.jasonhanley.com/2008/10/will-real-jhanley-please-stand-
up.html)

~~~
keidian
I have the same issue with my gmail, also first initial & last name. It's
amazing to me how many people don't know their own email address

~~~
simcop2387
This is part of the reason that while I have addresses with my real name, I
usually use my alias. I consider it actually a bit odd that with my generation
(grew up in the 90s) there's a significant portion of us that picked an alias
and have had that alias for a very large portion of our lives, for me it's
about 2/3 of my life.

Though to be honest even my own mother can't remember my email address even
though I've had the same one for over a decade now. (HN username @ yahoo is
one i've had for a long time).

~~~
keidian
I use a couple different emails for different purposes myself. A couple
different names I use online for most things and my first initial last name
for more professional stuff (ie: resumes, clients, etc)

------
incision
I'm routinely amazed at the number of sites which don't perform any sort of
email address validation. My wife has a rather common name and a
straightforward firstname.lastname gmail address.

As a result, she's continuously peppered with all sorts of notices and
confirmations intended for one of her many namesakes as well as the
occasional, amusing accusation of having "stolen" the address she has used
since summer '04.

~~~
stephen_g
My Gmail address is really generic (my first name and a number), and I too get
signups all the time - I even currently have two different people's bank
accounts sending me email.

I feel kind of bad, because one of them from Wells Fargo has been telling the
person that one of their accounts has been closed and their automatic bill
payments from it have been stopped - so I hope they worked that out before
they were kicked out of a rental place or something...

There's really nothing I can do - all bank's contact methods require you to
log into their account to send a "secure message", which I can't do (I do
sometimes cancel people's accounts who use my email using the "Forgot
password" recovery, but I'm not going to do that on someone's bank account,
and you'd need their social security number with most banks anyway), and I
have no idea what their real email address would be.

So, please let this be a lesson to anyone who makes services people sign up
for: _Always_ send a confirmation email where if you don't confirm it doesn't
send you emails, or at least _please_ send a welcome email having a link where
people can disassociate their email address if it's incorrect. I've only seen
Google doing this latter part properly...

And, if another service requires me to log into somebody else's account to
stop it spamming me... Seriously, just make it one-click unsubscribe...

~~~
incision
>My Gmail address is really generic (my first name and a number), and I too
get signups all the time - I even currently have two different people's bank
accounts sending me email.

We've seen the same. Of all places you'd think (hope) that banks would have a
handle on such things.

------
benatkin
I didn't see any mention of gmail coming out of beta. I wonder if gmail has
been in beta for most of the life of this addy.

Also would have been smart in retrospect to invest a few hundred in Apple
stock back then, instead of futzing around with email addresses. :-)

~~~
dmd
[http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/gmail-leaves-beta-
laun...](http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/gmail-leaves-beta-launches-
back-to-beta.html)

------
trhtrsh
Yes, people get mail that is misdirected, and sometimes receive spam as well.

