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Don't Like Your Gmail Email Address? You Can Finally Change It

Archmage said:
The problem isn’t my email address, it’s everybody else with the same first name and last name who thinks my email address is their email address 😩
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It is even worse with first initial and last name. There are a ton of people who don't know their own email addresses or at places of business who can't type. It is surprising the number of financial institutions and other large companies that don't require email verification (e.g. a double opt-in type thing) so I get plenty of stuff for other people. T-Mobile sends me a few people's stuff. Ditto Netflix, Virgin Media, Los Angeles Country sent me a ton of stuff urging me to vote etc (I am not and never have lived in LA), airlines and hotels do it too. With the airlines and hotels it is difficult to tell if they are incompetent or someone fraudulently using my email address lol. And people don't know that "jsmith" and "j.smith" are the same at gmail. etc.
 
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Archmage said:
The problem isn’t my email address, it’s everybody else with the same first name and last name who thinks my email address is their email address 😩
Click to expand...

I hear you!
A friend gave me an invite when it was still beta. I chose just my last name. While not wildly popular in USA, apparently it is common in Latin America and the Mediterranean countries. I was getting about a hundred wrong addressees per day. Then someone offered me a cash incentive to transfer the account, I either said no, or ignored them.

Following that, I started getting several hundred spams per day. Guess I pissed them off. I've been engaged in low level warfare with them for about fifteen years now. I stopped actively using the account, but still go in occasionally. I had a rule that rejects any email not in english, but that stopped working five years ago. (no idea why)

I regular get emails from some guy(?) that drives a uber-type taxi in some African country. Every time he takes a trip, a new email for that. I have about three cars in the US linked to the address, so warnings about service due and receipts for service performed. Etc, etc, etc.

I used to primarily use a .EDU address, now I mostly use iCloud.
 
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I definitely had one of those cringey childhood email addresses (as a teenager I thought the thing that was most notable about me was that I played two instruments, so my address was something like "musiciankid52"--always good future-proofing to put the word "kid" in your email address), but I updated to an iCloud email when I started college and that has been my primary email address ever since.
 
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Archmage said:
The problem isn’t my email address, it’s everybody else with the same first name and last name who thinks my email address is their email address 😩
Click to expand...
Absolutely this! I've had my firstname.lastname@me.com email since the start of MobileMe. When MobileMe ended and iCloud began, someone in TX with the same name as me started using firstname.lastname@icloud.com, which is technically mine because of the migration from me.com to icloud.com. To this day, I still get his Macy's monthly bills and all kinds of messages. I once received a job interview invite when he was job hunting, and even a $100 Best Buy gift certificate after his purchase. I've logged into all these accounts after changing the password to remove "my" email address. This super annoying guy still doesn't get it, literally and figuratively.
 
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I got into Gmail early and snagged a coveted short handle (my first initial and last name, with no extra numbers or anything). Score.

But honestly, I wish I hadn’t because I get such an absurd amount of crap directed to idiots who have my same last name and first initial. You would sort of think that if you’re giving out an address and never receiving any emails that you’d figure it out, but no.

I finally just started cancelling people’s appointments and declining their landscaping estimates because I’m so sick of it.
 
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You can also use a non-Gmail address as your Google account identifier but that’s been the case for a while now.
 
I am a little tempted to change my Gmail address but it's not available to me yet.
 
but can I merge them? my biggest gripe with google products like sheets or drive, or YouTube tv, is that I have to log into a different account seemingly every time I do anything. Is there a way to just like merge all my accounts into one account?
 
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HouseLannister said:
They are also expiring and freeing up old, unused accounts at an increased clip. So if you lost an account a decade ago because of bad password habits, you can probably get it back now.
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Do you have any source for this? I've only ever seen that they hold previously used usernames. If they freed them, you may receive email intended for the handle's previous user and that'd be a huge snafu.
 
Archmage said:
The problem isn’t my email address, it’s everybody else with the same first name and last name who thinks my email address is their email address 😩
Click to expand...
Apparently, I have the following interests/hobbies/bills:
  • Glider club member somewhere in Europe
  • Football (soccer) club in England
  • Receive Sumo gas bills from Australia
  • Receive a $161.85 AT&T wireless bill
  • Receive healthcare services from LCMC Health in Louisiana
  • Have an HSA account with $300
  • Etc...
 
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It's 2026 and we really need to have a unique identifier for each email address that is not the actual email address.

Surely in the age of blockchain we could manage this somehow?
 
Archmage said:
The problem isn’t my email address, it’s everybody else with the same first name and last name who thinks my email address is their email address 😩
Click to expand...
I agree...I get very important documents sent to me that are not mine. I let the senders know if I believe them not to be spam but then eventually another gets sent to me. People do not manage their email addresses very well...
 
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Archmage said:
The problem isn’t my email address, it’s everybody else with the same first name and last name who thinks my email address is their email address 😩
Click to expand...

or that adding a period to FnameLname (ex. Fname.Lname) was allowed so I get those emails as well sometimes.
 
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