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Comment by hx2a | Hacker News Reader

> Nowadays the closest I've gotten to this is the people who keep using my Gmail address as their own email address. I find this behavior rather bizarre and don't know what it achieves.

I have this problem also! I thought it was rare. In my case I think the person is very bad with computers and doesn't know what their email address is. I've gotten emails from their bank, cell phone, and even online dating. I tried mailing them a letter once to tell them they are making a mistake but nothing changed.

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I had some person's client email me regularly for years, which I ignored.

One day I decided to take action and sent a expletive filled email to them telling them that I was not the person they thought I was and to stop emailing me.

They then sent me an email telling me I was fired.

Quick, tell them where you want your last paycheck sent...

They sent me a list of all the system passwords at one point. I should have put myself on the payroll.

my gmail is my <lastname>@gmail.com

It's not a super-common lastname, but there are probably several hundred people with it in the US.

I get all sorts of email for people whose address is some variant of it, like <firstname.lastname>@gmail.com. I've gotten plane tickets, paypal payments, cancer diagnoses, Bar Mitzvah and Wedding invitations, college transcripts, all sorts of personal information.

In many cases, I don't think it's the fault of the person with the email; I think they give their email as "firstname.lastname@gmail.com" and some clerk just uses "lastname@gmail.com"

My Gmail is firstname.lastname@gmail and I get mail to that account that’s not for me. Must be the other party has a middle initial they are leaving out.

I would be careful with the "." in your username as someone else with `firstnamelastname@gmail.com` would likely get your email. I get the emails that are my ID with the "." in between.

I thought that gmail ignored the period, and would not allow registering one of those accounts if the other one already existed.

Well then, they didn't or it is relaxed now. I'm at the receiving end.

more likely some people just don't know how to write their own email address. or typos.

Pretty sure the dot is still ignored

Surely some of those are legitimate mistakes, but also I think things like the cancer diagnosis are probably designed to get you to respond. This proves that there's a human to spam/phish at that address. I've also gotten "we're here at the airport, are you coming to pick us up?"

That's why I don't respond to any of them.

A misdirected email is usually easy to handle. I have no problem responding to people telling them that they hit the wrong mailbox. The real problem is people using your email to register with services that provide no viable way for you to completely deregister from them.

Someone registered their brand new truck to my email address. I started getting a ton of automated email regarding the truck. The manufacturer didn't offer any options whatsoever to disentangle myself from that account. I even filled their support form and asked them to phone call the owner and sort it out. The only thing that did work was installing their app and honking the (parked) car horn from the other side of the world. A couple of days later, the account was magically deactivated and spam stopped.

when a 30k piece of equipment becomes a 30k broken (or liability!!) piece of machinery and that is public info, things change fast!

I’ve gotten invitations for a GP system, among countless signups for games as well as an account approval for a car. I’ve gotten a hold of one person who was ordering curtains with my email address, they were nice, I got hold of another person who was repairing their phone and they got angry. It’s really quite annoying, and half of the services aren’t even confirming the address, they just put whatever you fill in on the account and start sending ‘informational’ spam.

I have the same problem. Mostly for an old MobileMe/iCloud alias, but also for an entire domain that I own. Someone keeps signing up for Instagram accounts in another language.

My every day email is my name@myname.com, and I’ve had to purchase several typo domains and alias them.

could this be credential stuffing attempts? or just typos?

usually it is someone who has their email john.r.smith or similar and forgets they need the r

There are other stories of people forgetting which company it was with (gmail vs yahoo) and even of google accidentally giving out emails with a period and then silently removing periods.

The Gmail domain will deliver email to an email address regardless of periods in the username. My email address is first name period middle initial period last name. I can a period between any letter, all letters or none and I can still receive it.

Yeah, the story goes that very early on it let two people register joe.blow and joeblow.

PayPal let someone else add my Gmail address to their account, so I have to use a +paypal in my own account email.

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