[jjeaff]

Apparently Virgin Mobile doesn't verify email addresses nor does it let you reset your password by email. I assume they send you a text or something. So I've been getting billing notifications and other garbage for someone else's account for years.

[kentonv]

My email address is temporal at gmail.com. "Temporal" was my teenage gamer tag. It also turns out to mean "temporary" in Spanish. Ever since the Spanish-speaking world started using gmail, people have been signing up for stuff with my e-mail address every single day. Any new service I want to register an account with, I first have to hijack the existing account holding my address and delete it or change the email address.

But it gets worse!

Someone working at AT&T Mexico apparently decided to start entering my address as a placeholder when signing up customers that didn't have one. So I started getting phone bills -- with complete call histories -- for people all over Mexico. After several unsuccessful attempts to contact AT&T, I set up a filter to delete them.

Once a Spanish telecom did even worse, and populated seemingly their entire database with my address, so I'd get hundreds of phone bills all at once on the first of the month. I think they fixed it after two billing cycles.

Once a school in Chile made me an admin of their paid Zoom organization. I was actually unable to remove myself from their org or change the account's address, meaning I basically couldn't use Zoom until they removed me. (I'm unsure whether the school fixed it or Zoom fixed it after I made an angry tweet that went viral; whoever fixed it never bothered to follow up with me.)

The list goes on and on...

Wired even wrote an article about me. https://www.wired.com/story/misplaced-emails-took-over-inbox...

If you run a web service, PLEASE VERIFY ALL EMAIL ADDRESSES.

PS. Just now as I write this, someone in Spain scheduled an appointment for car service using my address. The e-mail contained a link to cancel the service, which I clicked. Oops.

[fencepost]

The Zoom one seems like it'd be easy to get someone's attention if being an admin means you get to add meetings for individuals.....

[gassius]

I got a common Hispanic name a my address is (nane first letter)surname at Gmail I receive a lot of information from many people from Patagonia to Toronto, and there are systems that I CANNOT BELIEVE what they send without confirming the account.

Worst offender, by far, is Chilean companies. Total disregard of privacy practices. Almost none from Spain (GPDR effects I guess)

[eru]

> (I'm unsure whether the school fixed it or Zoom fixed it after I made an angry tweet that went viral; whoever fixed it never bothered to follow up with me.)

If it was someone at Zoom: getting past the company's lawyers and PR people might have been too much of a barrier to bother.

[Gravityloss]

It can be an attack vector, to scan for placeholder addresses and register them and start receiving email with valuable information. For example something like [e-mail].