[Causality1]

Having a firstnamelastname address will subject you to a truly baffling level of false accounts and misaddressed email. The worst was probably the time I got emailed an excel sheet containing the names, personal details, and logins for an entire layer of middle managers for a small banking chain.

[5555624]

> Having a firstnamelastname address will subject you to a truly baffling level of false accounts and misaddressed email

First initial and last name it even worse. John, Jonathan, Julie, Jacob, James,and more all start with "J." I've gotten rental agreements, investment reports, appearance contracts, song demos, family pictures (not my family), and more.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Hell I add my middle initial too and I still get a remarkable amount of mail from people who don't even have the same middle initial.

[TeMPOraL]

At my second job, there was quite a commotion in the office one week, when my boss started receiving a steady stream of random people's CVs. It turned us a moment to figure out what's going on - turns out, there was an ad for seasonal fruit-picking work, which listed [lastname].[firstname]@gmail as the contact address; my boss had a [firstname][lastname]@gmail address, and a subset of wannabe fruit pickers were reversing address components for some reason (with the dot conveniently being an ignored character in GMail).

[Causality1]

dot being an ignored character

Don't remind me. I spent forever trying to figure out why I was still being charged for an Xbox account I'd already canceled. Turns out Microsoft had one account with the dot and one without.

[signal11]

> Having a firstnamelastname address will subject you to a truly baffling level of false accounts and misaddressed email

You're so right.

This is a big reason I'm looking forward to Apple's iCloud+ custom domain names. Outlook.com already supports custom domain names for paying customers in a very limited way, but hopefully Apple's move will light a fire under Gmail product management to offer this, perhaps through Google One.

[vel0city]

Google supports custom domains for Google accounts, I've been using it for years.

https://workspace.google.com/pricing.html

[signal11]

Google's support for custom domains is strictly for Workspace (formerly GSuite) customers. It's analogous to Microsoft 365 business plans[1].

Other providers are moving beyond this, i.e. offering custom domains to a wider set of (paying) users. Outlook.com already supports this in a limited way (domain must be with GoDaddy, kind of silly), for Microsoft 365 Family and Individual users. And Apple is apparently going to offer it to everyone as part of iCloud+ too.

Not everyone needs the full Workspace offering. In fact Google has Google One for exactly that kind of customer, and a custom domain name would fit neatly into the Google One proposition.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/business

[troebr]

I received a 1500€ quote for urinals and "bio boxes" (?) in Belgium just yesterday. Two weeks ago I received a boarding pass for the next day for a Spanish island. I think the worst is that since I share the same name, I imagine I could have used the boarding pass.

[gadders]

I seem to share a name with a beef farmer in Australia. I get regular emails about prime Aberdeen Angus sperm I can buy, and once I even got sent details of his farm financing with an Australian bank.

[Akronymus]

Thankfully for me, my last name is pretty damn rare. And only a thing in one area of the world. So I can go with firstnamelastname.