Ask Slashdot: Someone Else Is Using My Email Address

periklisv writes: I daily receive emails from adult dating sites, loan services, government agencies, online retailers etc, all of them either asking me to verify my account, or, even worse, having signed me up to their service (especially dating sites), which makes me really uncomfortable, my being a married man with children... I was one of the early lucky people that registered a gmail address using my lastname@gmail.com. This has proven pretty convenient over the years, as it's simple and short, which makes it easy to communicate over the phone, write down on applications etc. However, over the past six months, some dude in Australia (I live in the EU) who happens to have the same last name as myself is using it to sign up to all sorts of services...

I tried to locate the person on Facebook, Twitter etc and contacted a few that seemed to match, but I never got a response. So the question is, how do you cope with such a case, especially nowadays that sites seem to ignore the email verification for signups?
Leave your best answers in the comments. What would you do if someone else started giving out your email address?

Comments

Reverse the role

[Anonymous Coward]

When you find you have been signed up for a legit company site. Go to the site using your email and press the forgot password on the site. When you get the email back, log on and maybe you can get the information that you need to track him down.

Re:Reverse the role

[BarbaraHudson]

Why bother. Just mark it as spam. Eventually they'll need to reset their password or otherwise confirm their identity, and fail. If they ever contact you when they realize their mistake, mark that as spam too. They'll be like the protagonist in "I have no mouth and I must scream." Never heard again.

Re:Reverse the role

[gweihir]

That may make you look pretty stupid when they file a criminal complaint against you. The proxy does not help, or have you forgotten that they have your email address?

Take over!

[mhkohne]

If this person has used your e-mail for his sign-ups, it should be possible for you to take over their accounts by doing password reset.
Do so.
Change the passwords and lock them out.
Shut off any functionality that annoys you, or that costs them money, but try to leave the account intact so they can't re-acquire it.

They'll be forced to re-acquire the account with an e-mail they actually control, at which point perhaps they'll stop accidentally hassling you.

Of course, have a talk with your spouse before doing this, you don't want to create drama at home.

Re:Take over!

[thegarbz]

If this person has used your e-mail for his sign-ups, it should be possible for you to take over their accounts by doing password reset.

He's not. He's clearly giving out this email for things he doesn't care about or wants to use as a burner. Otherwise he'd never get the activation emails in the first place.

Re:nothing unusual

[93 Escort Wagon]

Never ascribe to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.

Re:I have a similar problem

[BarbaraHudson]

GMail treats embedded dots in the name portion as identical to the name without the embedded dot. my.name@example.org is the same as myname@example.org. Check (1) that the tld is identical - gmail.es (spain) isn't the same as gmail.py. (paraguay). Also check that the characters in the name portion really are identical, and not just appearing so in your browser because of font substitution. One way to do this is reply to it and see if the reply goes to you as well. If not, then the local parts are not in fact the same, even if they look the same on your system.

Also, standard fonts allow lots of substitutions that look the same but aren't. For example, BankOfArnerica is NOT the same as BankOfAmerica. The first one is spam bait (if you can't see the difference, cut-n-paste it into an editor and select fixed-width font).

Autocomplete compounds the problem

[Chuck Chunder]

I think autocomplete might compound the problem. People get it wrong once and their browser helpfully offers the wrong email in future forms. They send a group email with a wrong address, people reply-all and then everyone's email client thinks it's a known address and helpfully offers it as an autocomplete option in future. I have a first name last name @ gmail account and I get it quite a bit. Sometimes included on some family emails, sometimes emails from lawyers. Some guys Xbox account (who are you Cationicllama88?). Once someone's uber/lyft account, which I presumably could have used. Mostly I just ignore them if it is just some random site someone has signed up to. If it's personal/business then I normally reply pointing out the mistake and then delete the email, those people are generally appreciative of the effort. The ride sharing company was a pleasant surprise, I expected them to be a faceless void but got a real person who sorted it out quickly.

Re:Reset the password on the accounts.

[ShaunC]

Yes, exactly. I have the same problem with my Gmail account. Over the years many hundreds of people have mistaken it for their email address, distributed it far and wide, and entered it into all sorts of things. Sometimes I just let it go, especially if a site only sends one "thanks for registering" email. I hit delete and move on. But if the service is a particularly spammy one, I'll use the "forgot password" link, login, change the password, turn off all email-related options, etc.

I used to look for an option to delete the account entirely, but that invariably led to the same people signing back up for the same services again. Occasionally I'll try to do the other guy a favor and tell the sender that they have the wrong address. It usually isn't worth the effort. Someone has a Royal Bank of Scotland account registered to my email and no amount of emailing, filling out their contact form, or tweeting at them ever did any good so I just filtered that domain out.

Not much you can do about people sending random unsolicited communications, though. I've received some really interesting misdirected mail over the years, including some stuff from the European Space Agency, and being cc'd on an NFL player's contract negotiations with a new team.