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Comment by Androider | Hacker News Reader

The Sift report is based on your email address, among other things. My email box is full of random people's insurance quotes, medical and electric bills, birthday greetings, and welcome emails to services I've never heard of. We all know the company is going to spend approximately zero time to sanity check or sanitize that data firehose. Turns out the movie Brazil was a documentary.

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I have this problem too. E-mail addresses are terrible identifiers.

So many services fail to implement validation loops, and their customer support teams have no process when I call. The presumption everywhere is that a provided e-mail address is correct. Even after I explain the situation, some representatives will refuse to help because I couldn't validate a birthday or last-four of a credit card.

Out of curiosity, do you have a particularly simple email address? Over the years, my various email addresses have been some combination of my name and separator characters and I've had exactly one time where I got someone else's confirmation for an airline booking. For most people, I think email is a reasonable identifier. For people whose email is "bob@gmail.com" or the like (who are probably more common on HN than in the general population) not so much, but I'm pretty sure they're the exception not the rule.

I have my first and last name at gmail.com, with no middle initial. There are approximately 1,700 people in the United States with the same first and last name. I receive e-mail intended for others daily—personal correspondence, account-related messages, utility bills, quotes for work, messages from schools to parents, minor league events, mortgage documents...

(Gmail ignores punctuation in the local part, so I receive e-mail sent to my name both with and without punctuation.)

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