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rmunntoday at 1:16 AM2 repliesview on HN

> I have multiple family members who have healthy memory, but can't accurately remember their email address everytime: the localpart, the domain, the syntax, everything.

I got Gmail early enough that I have (my first name) dot (my last name) at gmail dot com. About twenty years ago, I started getting strange emails. At first I thought they were spam, because they were addressed to me by name but I had never joined those sites. Eventually I figured out that they were addressed to (my first name) (my last name) at gmail dot com. Which Gmail treats as the same address as the one with a dot in between.

Since I had never ever given out a version of my email address without a dot in the middle, I eventually figured out that these emails were meant for someone else who shared the same first and last name as me. But since I don't think Gmail would allow one person to register [email protected] and then later allow someone else to register [email protected], my name doppelganger must have registered [email protected], and then forgot the domain and given out [email protected] when asked for an email address. And probably never noticed that they weren't receiving emails like "Dear customer, thank you for purchasing (product). Would you like to try (other product)?", so they never realized that they were giving out the wrong email address.


Replies

Semaphortoday at 4:24 AM

I also have [email protected] (which I don’t use anymore, and just keep around), I get all kinds of private mails. Contracts, invoices, confidential material, private photos.

And of course, also automated signup mails, newsletters (which I make sure to block and report as spam, unsubscribing is a feature for newsletters that are opt-in), transactional mails etc.

People really suck at knowing what their e-mail is. The private mails are down to 1/month, the others to ~3/week, but it used to be much higher for both categories.

Oh and of course there is some kind of weird scam going on where spammers on German classifieds (Kleinanzeigen) send an e-mail to [email protected] for whatever public first and last name of the lister is, and ask if the product is still available. No link, nothing. And all sent via gmail which has by an overwhelming majority become the biggest sender of spam for me. I guess they are trying to get someone to reply and then do some manual scam or something.

jcranmertoday at 1:24 AM

Randall estimates in the alt-text of https://xkcd.com/1279/ that there's about ¾ of a million people who just use somebody else's email on gmail without realizing it's not their email address.