[riddley]

I have a gmail address that at least three other people think is their address. I constantly get emails for the dumb stuff they sign up for. NONE of them ever have an "I didn't request this" link. I mean, I get it. That won't make them money, but oh man is it annoying.

[cestith]

I get these all the time. The most fun was probably when I was given and building layout, door at which to arrive, schedule, and security information to get into a pro sports arena for a game as an employee of some vendor. The least fun was probably when I ended up talking to some drug company’s general counsel about why it’s not okay to send information about a discount program for a specific drug that treats one specific disorder with a bunch of personal information about the patient to an unverified email address. I went on to explain how their tech staff could prevent that, and remind them of the fines and possible jail time involved with HIPAA and HITECH violations.

[JimTheMan]

I get scammers using my email to sign up for websites, but they very obviously cannot login to my account. I often wonder what is in it for them. I'm sure someone on HN can tell me!

[vintermann]

Commission schemes, possibly. Sign up with their code and they get something out of it. So they submit 10000 harvested addresses, and hope some small % of them think it's something they signed up for and complete the registration process.

You'd think big companies would know better than enlisting spammers to spam on their behalf, but I'm pretty sure Netflix had a scheme like this a few years ago. "Grow at any costs" sites like streaming or social media are probably happy with a tiny bit of plausible deniability for their spamming.

[AndroTux]

I assume they just need a valid email address to put in and hope they can use the service without email verification.

[hnfong]

The weirdest time was when I got on a girl sorority email list. Told them they got the wrong email a couple times, gave up, and just added a mail filter...

[undebuggable]

I have the same with my email address. There seriously exist people out there who think that if they start to give away everywhere an email address, this email address will become theirs. Then there are many service providers and institutions who don't verify an email but simply start sending stuff to it.

[zephen]

I have exactly the same problem.

> I mean, I get it.

I don't.

Seriously, that's a huge fricking red flag. Obviously, most of those companies I would never do business with anyway, but this puts it over the line for all the others.

If they don't understand the first thing about validating their putative customers' emails by, you know, sending an email saying "is this really you?" then they've completely proven their technical incompetence.

The worst one is robinhood. I have two different email addresses that different people have used to sign up for robinhood accounts (back when they were giving anybody an account).

Occasionally, I tweak them about sending me shit.

"Sure! Just send us a copy of your photo ID to prove you're not that person."

Nah, bro, you've proven you're clueless, and there's no way I'm sending PIA to clueless people.

[rimliu]

I feel your pain. My gmail address is just my first name, and oh boy, don't half of the people sharing the same first name also think they share my email.

[macintux]

I've become email acquaintances with two people who have similar iCloud addresses as mine, since I've been forwarding their mail for years now.

[account42]

I just report those as spam every time.