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Comment by ben_jones | Hacker News Reader

According to this site, the Myspace data set contains a profile with an email I wasn't issued until 2012. So my university reissues emails. So I could probably throw it into a bunch of "recover password" forms. That kinda sucks.

So when my email gets reissued i'll have to track down every single website it's linked to and purge any personal information etc. Fantastic.

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You should push for them to change that practice. If your e-mail address isn't permanent, you probably shouldn't register it with other sites, or else track every site that uses it for authentication (account recovery) so you can update to your new e-mail address when you move on.

Out of curiosity, what do the usernames (aka local part) of the e-mail addresses look like? Are they based on names/initials? Are they arbitrary?

The format is `${firstLetterFirstName}${lastName}${int}`.

My high school followed a similar structure, but had the graduating year as a suffix, implying that they would never be reused.

I wouldn't be surprised if this was rampant in educational institutions who have to provision emails to people with identical names all the time.

why not use a sub domain? user@class16.school.com for example.

or a Gmail wildcard alias username+alias@gmail.com

most universities where I live use either stu120691 [at] mail.uni-kiel.de, or stu120691 [at] informatik.uni-kiel.de, or allow you to choose a custom prefix for prefix [at] stu.uni-kiel.de and prefix [at] informatik.uni-kiel.de

(those addresses are mine, first the generic ID, then the generic ID [at] faculty, then prefix [at] generic (I don’t have one), then prefix [at] faculty; first comes first serve on prefixes)

I've never signed up for myspace, and yet it tells me one of my emails is compromised there.

I'm not sure what to make of that information, since I know it's not a recycled email address.

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