I currently have my full name on GMail and Proton, but I actually had my first name on GMail when it first launched. As in, if my name was Brian (it isn’t (it might be (it isn’t))) I had brian@gmail.com. Sold it for £1000.
Wouldnt you get extra spam for having such a simple name?
I have this and the other people with my name give it as their own email address all the time, apparently not understanding that you don’t get the address just for existing.
That’s pretty good, for how bad it is.
I have a pretty old gmail address that’s fmlast@gmail, and several years ago there was a lady with fmlast12@gmail who kept leaving the numbers off. It wasn’t that bad though, and for one or two important things I replied to help.
it happens to me too, though my format is lastname.firstinitial, so I have more potential for confusion as my last name isn’t super uncommon.
people just sign up for stuff with it. sometimes banks even.
Ha ha this happens to me so much. I even had to help a poor dude out because his account (and stuff getting delivered) all was under my email.
On a side note, I got the firstnamelastname@gmail, but Gmail often proposed the firstname.lastname@gmail in autocomplete, with my image and all, so I just “recovered” it. Now I have both when I’m trying to ditch Google 🤷🏼♀️
Gmail addresses with and without a dot are actually identical. Mine has a dot but I also get emails without the dot.
There must be some names that invalidates your claim (I’m just bewildered if it’s true)
Like Abc Def and Ab Cdef style. Or is firs.tnamelastname valid too?
Learned something today then! 👍
Edit: doesn’t work for me
Ugh same. My first name is very common, last name moderately uncommon. I’ve gotten loads of stuff. Various quotes and invoices (vet, mechanic, window installation), invitations to child care groups, family gathering invitations (that one I think was the person writing the email address, not the person with my name).
Most of the time I just immediately unsubscribe or block or whatever and move on, but there’s some (like the child care group) I had to reach out to because that could be potentially dangerous.
Get your own email right, people! It shouldn’t be my responsibility to manage your email. Some of that shit includes your home address too.
as cool as it is to have a gmail account from back then, I have an older lady in the US who just registers things against it, because we have the same first initial and last name. I found her on facebook and messaged her to tell to please stop using my email address, she still does it from time to time.
Its crazy that stuff like ebay will let you verify an account with a mobile number, but never verify the email address. I ended up moving her ebay account to an email address that I created, but I was tempted to buy a bunch of shit for her…
Probably more a problem for Americans all being named John Smith
You could also get a private E-Mail address that doesn’t scan all your mails to make money out of it. Google tries to enprison you in it’s ecosystem by “facilitating” logins and so on. If you don’t pay with money, you pay with your data.
Both are great alternatives for only a couple of bucks a month.
Huge vote for mailbox.org. They have calendars, contract lists, online storage, etc. I’ve been able to get rid of Google/gmail almost entirely from my phone.
Also
freeincluded video conferences!I don’t know anything about mailbox.org, but I’m sure it’s way less sketchy than Google. It’s just interesting you would praise their free video conferences after posting “if you don’t pay with money, you pay with data.”
Should have said ‘included’ rather than ‘free’ since it is a paid service
Like the other commenter said, it is included in the price. It is called OpenTalk and is as secure as it gets.
Also tutamail
Can vouch for TutaMail, currently on it as I attempt all the hurdles of serting up a self-hosted mail solution.
You should really refrain from trying that, email is one of the few things youre better off not hosting yourself.
You should own the domain of your email addresses, but please use a hosting service, for your own good
Oh believe me, I’m well aware lol. I’ve already got the setup you’re describing. It’ll probably never amount to anything, but I’m still going to try and see if I can get something that most email providers will send mail to and accept mail from, without putting in the spam folder.
Gmail and MS also make other providers jump through crazy hoops too to let users create a new email, lest they be flagged as a “spam” provider and blacklisted by the 2 services.
The modern internet sucks.
Last year, I saw an article written by a recruiter about how recruiters are sort of biased against you if you use a non-GMail account because it “feels” like you’re on old tech and out of touch and, therefore, will be hard to place and, Void, did it make be so mad.
Purelymail is also an amazing service. 10€ per year for unlimited storage and addresses, and you can add your own domains.
Been using them with a custom domain for about 8 months and love it, no issues at all.
I gave up. I own my name as a domain.
So if my name was John Doe, as an example, my domain would be Johndoe.com and my email would be John@Johndoe (dot) com.
My name isn’t John Doe.
Gmail is cool and all, but it’s pretty sweet to have my custom domain name and email.
The domain I really want is just my last name, so I can be firstname@lastname (dot) com.
Unfortunately my last name isn’t uncommon and the last time I checked, the squatters on the domain were asking like $3k usd for it.
All kind of nope on that.
I got my gmail as my name like a year ago because I just have an uncommon name (Denvil)
Denvil my man, have a great day!!
My name is uncommon enough that I can always pick my name everywhere, and when I can’t it means I forgot I had an account.
And here I am, with a firstname@lastname.de address, running my own mail server.
- People sometimes act like this is pure magic
- Some providers only allow popular mail services on signup (fuck those), so I had to set up a GMail address that just redirects to my actual one
- My last name is really hard to spell, so it probably wasn’t the best idea, since I always struggle communicating that address verbally
The pain of running this still beats having to deal with a free provider out there that either spams my inbox with their own BS or just skims through the data to serve me ads.
I have a few domain names, including firstnamelastname.co.uk. I mostly use it for spam monitoring; everyone gets a different address, so eBay has ebay@, Microsoft has microsoft@, etc. It’s harder for them to link my identities together and if I suddenly start getting fuckloads of spam I know who leaked/sold my address. Fuck you, LinkedIn and LastFM.
I also had my own email server until recently (MailInABox on Proxmox), but I was looking for a cloud storage provider so I ended up signing up for Proton and moving my email there.
I’m using my custom domain email with a hosting service (mailbox.org). Hosting on my own was a pain in the ass and you also have to deal with spam filters not trusting you.
QR codes can help
Sadly I didn’t think to try to grab my last name until recently, and it has been owned for quite a while.
I have @firstnamelastname.tld since last name was taken (unrelated to me).
Typically use company@firstnamelastname.tld when giving out my email to keep track of spam so I used airline@firstnamelastname.tld when buying tickets.
At the check in the person saw my airline@ email and askes: oh do you also work for airline?
Nice! I have firstname@lastname.us.
Congrats!
What setup did you use? I’m interested in doing this as well. I’ve already self hosted a NAS with vpn access using an RPI4 with PiVPN. It works quite well.
Yeah, I got my name when gmail was ‘invite only’ :/
It actually kinda sucks. At any given time I have between 3 and a zillion idiots around the globe who, for months or years on end, keep buying concert tickets, airline/vacation bookings, get job hits, legal firm or health-care notifications … using my email (jbloggs@gmail.com) instead of (jbloggs999@gmail.com) or whatever variant they actually signed up for, since I got ‘just my name’ and they keep. forgetting. their. own. bloody. email.
And most of the time this shit is sent from a ‘noreply@wherever.net’ so I can’t even tell them they have the wrong email address. Grrrrrrr.
I really hope that is not your real email
Joe Bloggs is the UK equivalent of Joe Shmoe, John Doe etc - a common placeholder name for the average person.
or real name.
Or real phone
Hah, no don’t worry ;)
I never thought I’d meet the inventor of blogs!
Same here. And the reasons you mention are exactly the reason I deleted that account a few years ago when I switched to Fastmail.
A couple of my friends are willing to put up with it, but always mention the volume of spam they deal with.
I’ve had my new email address for 6-odd years and only have one regular spam source - from a hack of an online shop - but as I used a username+shopname email alias for it, it’s easy to detect and automatically handle.
Now I use Fastmail’s “Masked Email” feature for each online account. When (not if) a site gets hacked, I just change the site to use a new masked address and block/delete the old one, and then it’s useless to scammers/spammers.
Have you RSVPed for the soccer fundraiser yet? -_-
Same, the best one was the dude who created an account with my email but his own phone number. So I text him to try and scare him with the fact that some random dude got hold of his private info. He was unfazed and replied “my nephew set it up for me, guess we’ve got the same email address”…
There is still a woman in the Miami area who uses my email for everything. I’ve even received her completed tax documents from her accountant and was told to “disregard” when I replied to it. It’s been over ten years. My name isn’t even Alicia.
I’ve had someone’s emails for years, every once in a while I get a new one from the doctor or when they need to recover another account its so weird. But they use the same email but with a dot. Even their google recovery emails from another account
I recently signed up for a new email. I check the address sometimes before entering it somewhere. It’s not hard.
I got my Gmail account because someone gave me one of their early adopter invites LOL.
Same way back in the land of 2006.
It is still under my Livejournal name hahahaha.
Yeah, I never got an early adopter invite, and by the time it launched to the public, someone already had my name. Apparently there’s some middle aged programmer who shares my name, and he got an invite.
I made a gmail with my name like 2 years ago, I just have an uncommon name ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’ve tried using my name in email/accounts for decades and never got it. I have a name so common people think I’m making it up when I tell them. It also makes me not too worried about posting it online, because even if you knew it and my location you still probably couldn’t find the right person.
Nice to meet you John Smith.
Nice x3
I wish I had a slightly more common name sometimes tbf, cause it never appears on coke bottles or any other novelty that includes names lol. Googling my name just gives a result for a prince from the 14 century, and the year I was born there were only 3 other people with my name according to a naming website haha, not including my last name of course which is also one of the rarer ones from what I gather, so ye
Same! Even on Facebook, there is no one with my name (including me). I’ve recently accquired a
lastname.tlddomain, and it wasn’t taken already :D
I was there when it was invite only, child. They used to have an IM chat too.
Google still has a chat embedded in Gmail, but because Google is grotesquely incompetent they’ve never succeeded in making a good messaging service. I think they’ve had like 15, but they are too fucked up to just make one work.
One of the things I bring up if someone says “we should run the government like a business”
The hangouts app was actually sick. You could connect to Google voice and your actual phone number allowing you to:
- place phone calls from voice on your computer or phone
- place phone calls from your actual number on your phone
- send text messages from voice on your computer or phone
- send text messages from your actual number on your phone (and possibly computer)
- send ims from your computer or phone
It was available within gmail or on its own dedicated site, and it automatically collated conversations regardless of send medium.
It made communication free and easy regardless of what device I was using–then they rebranded it and made it IM only–then they killed it.
It’s still IM only but not dead. Hangouts became Chat and all your old Hangouts IMs should still be there. I use it all the time.
Man I completely forgot Gmail chat existed, and I used it for a while quite regularly.
Oh shit yeah! I remember begging a friend who got one to send me an invite. Didnt you only get like 3 invites to begin with or something?
I wanna say it was more than that, I don’t remember the number but I remember saying “damn that’s a lot.” I wanna say it was maybe like 10?
It was 10 yep.
Fair enough i thought they started at 3 and then bumped it up later
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