I have a really common name and I managed to grab my own name @outlook.com early on, which feels very nice.
People who want to sign up for dating and porn websites who don't want to use their own email address often use mine by sheer guesswork, which does not feel nice.
>>16589 It could be worse. If you used your own domain name you'd see that spammers will send their messages in your name, leaving you to pick up the bounce notifications. These can number in the thousands.
>>16594 Okay, yeah, that is me. But last night some teenlad in London signed up for Cougar Dating using my email address and I felt compelled to /101/ it.
>>16595 I feel your pain. Someone signed up to POF with my address. I thought it might have been a joke, but no, they were a real person and had entered their address incorrectly.
>>16596 In the past few months I've been getting emails from a private high school in Texas, it looks like some parent has put their email address in incorrectly on a form and I'm getting all sorts of requests for information about their daughter's grades.
>>16596 Proper website design demands that email address verification is achieved almost entirely through an activation email (and not by ensuring it adheres to your incomplete understanding of what an email address is supposed to look like). I'd feel a whole lot more comfortable asserting this if I didn't have to coach the majority of my peers on the Work Programme through this very process.
>>16598 >(and not by ensuring it adheres to your incomplete understanding of what an email address is supposed to look like)
Fuck, this. It seems like every other site wants to try and validate email addresses themselves, and inevitably ends up fucking up. What's the right datatype to store an email address in a database? VARCHAR(254). The local part can be up to 64, the domain part can be up to 255, but the whole thing needs to still fit inside 256 after you've put it inside a pair of <>. If you really need to validate the format of an address (and consensus seems to be that this isn't even that good an idea) then at least use something ready made like http://isemail.info.
I got a Yahoo email address in about 1999 which is my real forename with a low number after it. It attracts a lot of spam.
Last December there was a fake Amazon order virus going around where someone a got an "Amazon" "thank you for you order" email which said the detail of the order were in the enclosed zip file, and the zip contained a virus.
Someone must have spoofed the header so "my" email sent out thousands of these things. I only found out because of hundreds of "delivery failed" notifications coming back and a couple of people saying "I haven't ordered anything. What's going on?" It got quite exciting seeing how many people would fall for "my" scam.
They have been getting hacked left right and centre the last couple of years but mine wasn't because I never allowed them to upgrade to the new interface which was vulnerable to an "XML exploit" or something, I seem to remember reading.
>>16619 I'm growing tempted to delete my Outlook email address, too, which is a real shame because it looks fucking mint on my CV. Luckily, I can turn any email address into an @physics.org one for as long as I'm still a member of the IOP.
>>16624 >which is a real shame because it looks fucking mint on my CV
No, it doesn't. I see hundreds of CVs per month, I can assure you that "quality of email address" is extremely low on my list of filters when considering people for a job.
>>16639 Step 1: Use the IOP website for a second ever time.
Step 2: Sign up as an associate member of the IOP (£20something for students, I think about double that for non-students).
Step 3: Choose your @physics.org email address, which just redirects all mail sent to it to an email address of your choosing.
Step 4: Enjoy receiving Physics World every month, in particular for its full-page adverts for power supplies and vacuum equipment which are made to look super-sexy like cars.
