| 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. |