This could maybe explain some of the emails I received, but not all of them
I received some responses to yesterday's post [1]. The first was from Lionel Dricot [2] who reported that he, too, has received emails for other Lionel Dricot's that lived near him. He also stated that it may be a bug in Gmail where one person can register “seanconner@gmail.com”; someone else could register “sean.conner@gmail.com” but when receiving emails, Gmail condenses the two addresses into one. That's possible, but I would suspect that would have been an issue caught early on. I've had my Gmail account for twenty years now [3] [Has it been that long? —Sean] [Yes, it has. —Editor] [Shut up! —Sean]. and it's only been in the past few years that this has been an issue.
He also stated that people could just really be that bad with email addresses.
The second response has an explanation that is rather dire:
From: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
To: seanconner@gmail.com
Subject: People non knowing their email
Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2024 08:24:51 +0200
> Hi, considering you've been shared on Hacker News, I'm afraid sooner or later some script kiddie will start abusing your address just to annoy you. I hope this will never happen ;) Thanks for sharing your blog, ave [sic] a nice day, White_Rabbit
That could explain maybe some of the email I get, which to me, I consider spam that Gmail hasn't filtered yet. But it doesn't explain emails sent to “sean.conner@gmail.com” that are obviously not a “Sean Conner,” and yet definitely contains private information. It also seems excessive to register a TikTok account or even an Instagram account [4].
And speaking of Tiktok, I finally have an account name associated with the TikTok account, so I have to wonder why “mommakmiller” decided to use my Gmail account? Perhaps they don't have an email account and need one to sign up for TikTok? Perhaps they didn't want to use their real email account? Perhaps they don't realize the danger in that?
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