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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

I’m a different person, but this happens to me, too. I have the kstrauser@yahoo.com email address because I signed up for it like 25 years ago. I log in every 6 months to see what the few other kstrausers in the world have signed me up for.

Not jsmith, but kstrauser. Not Gmail, but Yahoo. And I still get banking docs, and HOA meeting minutes, and birthday party invitations, and Facebook logins, and other bizarre random stuff.

I have so many questions. I’ve typoed my address before and had to correct it. That’s understandable. But to wholly invent one and say, yep, that looks good even though I’ve never used it before, I’m sure it’ll be fine! I just don’t get it.

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I have a catch-all on a .com.au domain where there exists a later 1000+ people organisation with the equivalent .gov.au. I get what you described but from many, many people - divorce proceedings, legal discussions, financial documents, health things, etc.

Yeah I have josephg@gmail. The amount of spam that account gets is wild - about 50-100 emails hit the inbox per day. I got soft-locked out of google docs a few months ago because my google account's 25gb quota was exhausted.

Some of the emails are really unfortunate stuff. "Your account was added as a backup address." - Then inevitably, a few weeks later, dozens of password reset emails. Sorry bud. I've received pay stubs. Orders and invoices. I get phone bills every month for someone in India. Its chaos.

Early on I'd sometimes reply to these random emails telling people they've got the wrong address. The most astonishing reply I ever got was from HSBC bank telling me I needed to come into the branch to change my email address. Over the course of a week, I explained about 3 times that that was impossible. That I live in Australia. That I'm not their customer, and its not my account. Eventually they told me they were disabling online banking on my account. Now I've given up replying at all.

Send emails into that pit of PII misery if you want. I don't read them.

Some of these banks are ridiculous. HDFC bank insists that I send them my photo id, address, phone number, and my Indian id number to prove that I'm not their customer. I tried explaining that I don't have an Indian id number because I don't live in India but they insisted they can't help me unless I provide all of this. Then they sent me legal notices threatening me for not paying "my" bills. I send all their stuff to spam now.

I had one that person seemed to think their @twitter name was the same thing as my gmail address. Haven't seen it in a while, maybe they figured it out after I told their kid's teacher they had the wrong person...

I have very weird and rare @gmail.com and I Still get other peoples mail sometimes.

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