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Comment by Severian | Hacker News Reader

Let me tell you, Apple's iCloud policies are STUPID. Once upon a time you could sign up to an account WITHOUT verifying your email. Someone signed up under my Gmail account, and it's been stuck there since.

As the author found, support is useless . It took me close to 2 weeks after emailing Tim Cook about the situation, since I was seriously considering an iPhone. Executive liason had it reset for me.

I was able to change the password, login, and the VERY next day the password was changed (presumably from whomever is using it on THIER phone). I've given up. My time is not worth chasing this down.

I may eventually just start harassing the douchebag who thinks they have my email address, but there are like 3 or 4 people whom i get email for. AFAICT every single one is a boomer.

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I had a similar thing happen with an Australian insurance company sending me contract details for some woman who had her car and home insurance with them. I don't know if she added the wrong email by mistake or their IT fucked up connecting data from a third party service (I've never been in Australia, and have never made business with the insurance company), but it was hard work getting them to fix it.

Their support did nothing. Their privacy department did nothing. What finally set things into motion was complaining to their regulatory authority. Wouldn't you know it, within two days, I had a personal email saying they'd remove my email from the account, and they haven't emailed me since.

Would emailing the insurance company in question and saying you were looking to cancel your insurance policy be an option?

Possibly, but I didn't want to cause their client any trouble by trying to cancel her policy. I'm pretty sure she didn't do it to annoy me. And if she did I'd be amazed by the creativity and effort she put into trolling some nobody on the other side of the planet.

Someone signed up to Tesco using my email address, and there was no option to delete the account, even after resetting the account password.

So I changed the email address on the account to Tesco support's email address, now they can deal with it.

I wonder if their systems were prepared for automated replies between validated email addresses. Love the approach!

Can you setup your iCloud using that gmail address but with a different number or placement of dots?

sev.erian@gmail and severian@gmail are the same to gmail but many places treat them as different. (I don’t know what iCloud does.)

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150

Most services have figured this out now and normalize the field internally to prevent this, mostly for spam reasons.

Terrible yet hilarious. Please never give up the fight!

This is straight out of Office Space, except In Real Life.

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