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Comment by Reason077 | Hacker News Reader

Parents: If you want to help your kids acquire prestigious email addresses, don't give them a relatively common name like "Peter"!

On the other hand, I have (first initial)(surname)@gmail.com and you wouldn't believe how many misdirected messages I get for people with the same initial and surname as me...

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I have firstname@gmail.com. I could tell you all about how easy you get off.

Interesting fact: most emails I incorrectly receive is because whoever creates the accounts/makes the orders/etc knowingly provides websites with my email instead of their own.

All in all it’s pretty crazy.

I sometimes do that as a joke, kind of a revenge not being the first one to get the email address.

lastname@gmail.com here. I really don't understand people. Especially when I get invoices and/or important-looking reminders.

Isn't that called phishing?

I have last name at gmail too and I can tell you, we win on misdirected mail due to people typing `firstname lastname@gmail.com`

I have reject@gmail.com crazy, crazy amount of spam from dummy accounts and/or developer emails.

I have a fun one. I own syslog.com (since 1997) and I get all kinds of email sent from mis-configured routers and other devices meant to write to syslog, but somehow it escapes and ends up in my inbox.

The problem with that is many times these are automated and poorly configured, so I'll get hundreds of emails a minute from really badly broken setups. I generally email support at the domain owners but most of the time I have to blacklist them at the server.

That's the beauty of having a completely unique Firstname Lastname. The downside is that my entire life is easily accessible on the interwebs. My high school baseball scores from 15 years ago are on the third page of google.

I know exactly what you mean - my full name is globally unique, so far as I can tell, and everywhere I go it is always available for use as a handle. That does make it unusually easy to look me up, but that's been true for a long time, and I'm okay with it.

"Peter" is fine, as long as there's also an elaborate middle name. Mr. P. Harpsichord Smith will never have trouble getting a distinctive email address.

Good old Harpy, what a guy.

I can speak from experience that using your middle name creates it's own set of super annoying issues.

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