Ask HN: GMail Username Issue
I have a user id to gmail that is joe.none@gmail.com. Gmail has assigned joenone@gmail.com to someone else. All his personal (including his banking details) emails are showing up in my inbox and also, he tries to reset the password every other day and that also shows up, in all the emails that is associated with my gmail account. Gmail says joe.none & joenone are the same email addresses, but I can guarantee you this is not the case. Has anyone run into this issue? If yes, please direct me in the right direction to solve it. Thank you.
28 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 79.9 ms ] threadThe reason I suggest it is that the "dots don't matter" behavior has been in Gmail for a while. I'd be surprised to find that they assigned two people the "same" username. Anecdotally, I've actually had people sign up to websites using one of my email addresses (ie: a random person used one of my Gmail accounts as the backup email address on his Gmail account).
As of today, my account is associated with seven addresses--that is, seven people said my email address was their alternative email address. 2,000 messages in the spam folder over ~1 month. Sometimes a dozen can hit my inbox per day; But, I'm guessing these are legit newsletters that people use my address for. And someone in South America used it to sign up for a facebook account. I was getting slammed with his friend requests and lost password requests until I just filtered them out.
sigh ... Rant over, and I feel better.
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=10313#
As others have stated the problem is that someone thinks their address is saiganesh@gmail.com when it really isn't but they use it anyway.
If you can find another way to contact this other person you might try it to tell him that his email is not what he thinks it is.
The dot is a distraction in this case. He is passing out your email address, thinking it is his. When he does this, you get emails intended for him. This is not a technical problem, and doesn't really have a technical solution.
The dots are superficial -- you can add them or remove them as you want. The login form for gmail even respects this, as I can add or subtract dots however I want.
My email address is barry.melton -- I can send and receive email as barrymelton as well, or b.a.r.rymelton, or barry.melt.on or whatever.
If one of these emails has his phone number, call him. If not, contact e.g. a bank that sends email to him, tell them "you've got the email wrong. Please notify your client because I have no way of reaching him, and you probably do". The fraud department of the bank will be able to take care of that quickly - you can start with "either this is a fraud, or a mistake, but here's the story ..." when you talk to them.
It might be helpful to tell them (and hopefully relay to him) that this is YOUR email address, you've had it for a while.
Expect the guy to ask you to sign over your email address to him, because his name is "Joe None" and your violating his property, or something crazy like that. Don't get angry, and definitely don't do anything stupid like impersonating him, logging in to his bank account or anything like that.
This is not legal advice, and I hope you won't need any after you do the right thing and try to resolve this....
If the email seems to be personal, I respond and ask them to have "Natelie" contact me, but she never has.
I agree with you, it's very frustrating. I don't have any solution, but I'll be following this thread closely.
Short Story: There's been an 'urban legend' that people from the early gmail invite days could register the same email, the only difference being dots. The more likely scenario is that he's filling in the wrong email on web forms, it's emailing you, and it's not emailing him at all. He doesn't have access to the email.
Is there anything that proves he also has access to a dot-version of the email account? You being sent emails from banks only proves that he's filling that email into a form, not that he has access to the account.
All this is assuming that the other guy cannot get into this "common" gmail account and you are not enjoying looking at all the other emails that you get.
However, the experience you have described seems to prove that it IS the case - i.e. you are receiving messages sent to either address. The other person is attempting to reset their password every other day because they cannot login to your account (since they don't know the password for your account).
It seems to be a simple case of a user who does not know their own gmail address. Admittedly, this happens more frequently with aol users than gmail users.
Anyway, since you have all his personal (including his banking details) emails, it shouldn't be too difficult to find a phone number of physical address to contact him.
Just don't reference this link...if his first language isn't English, and he finds this information on a "hacker website", he may contact Google to reset YOUR password :-)
I've probably gotten HUNDREDS of e-mails for noahclark@gmail.com (I can tell by checking the to field) in my noah.clark@gmail.com. I know where he lives, what type of art he collects, major purchases, and some pretty significant family issues as well as the homework he has been assigned.
I just do my best to notify who ever sent the e-mail that they have the wrong address.
My gmail account has been around since invite beta.
I figure that somewhere along the lines google changed their system from dotted and non-dotted addresses being unique and accounts made before this have been affected.