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

Ditto. There's nothing you can do

[seoras]

Back in '97 I registered a personal domain [firstname][lastname].com and I have a very common Anglo name.
Email address is [firstname]@[firstname][lastname].com

There's a real estate agent in Florida who's been happily giving out my email address to clients, lawyers, banks etc for a decade now.
I've had very personal information emailed to me, bank loan applications etc.
I even had one person start an email fight with me, refusing to believe I wasn't who they thought I was, which I ended by point them at the "whois" ownership record of my domain.

There's nothing I can do about it, nor can you. Just delete the emails that come in and filter. Or create a new email account.

The year before I registered my email address I had been using [lastname].freeserve.co.uk which was the UK's first large scale ISP.
I had some idiot email me a plan to rob their local supermarket which I passed on to the authorities...

Re:I have a similar problem

[LostOne]

I think you'll find this turns out *not* to be true. What is significant in the "local part" of the email address is *up to the local system* as long as it is in the set of characters that are permitted. Of course, Google (and anyone else for that matter) is perfectly allowed to ignore dots in the local part. But everyone is also perfectly allowed to treat them as significant.

Also, your wiki link does not back up your assertion that "A.BC" and "ABC" must be the same mailbox. It only gives rules on where a dot can appear unquoted in the local part. It does not say that it is to be ignored when routing.

Additionally, decades of operational practice on the Internet also directly violates your assertion. Dots have *always* been potentially significant for a local part. They were required for compuserve addresses back in the beginning, for instance.

NOTE: I am NOT saying that Google is doing things wrong. What they are doing is allowed. They are free to interpret the local part however they want. However, they are NOT required to ignore dots.