Have a go at creating an email account on yahoo using the name Ronald Reagan and variants to create an email address from this name. The number of email addresses already used for this name is actually not that bad. They may even be legitimate.

I tried it with my name and was surprised how many email variants were already used. And I always thought that my name+surname was fairly unique. Now I need to find my twins in this world.

Here is another variant of this.

A friend of mine recently had his name.surname@gmail account hacked into by someone in Lagos Nigeria (he has never gotten within a 1000 km of Nigera). The bad guy must have hacked into a session where the password was still considered valid. Fortunately, the password wasn't changed because this requires specifying the old password. However, to create some confusion the hacker set the default language to Arabic and (here comes the good part) set the reply email to name.surname@yahoo.com. Then the hacker sent an email to all the contacts asking for money etc. etc. Anyone doing a reply sending this guy to hell or maybe just a simple question mark would very likely only see the name.surname and not catch the change from @gmail to @yahoo. Oh yes, at the end the hacker erased all contacts and emails.

So what is the next step? Contact Yahoo and Gmail? Forget it!

Gmail simply doesn't answer when you notify them of this.

Yahoo says it can't help with this because it violates their privacy policy. Thus this hacker is protected!

So what shall we call these emails that use your name?

Is it a form of identity theft?

The term email squatter also comes to my mind.

OK, it's time to find my twins.

I'll send them an email.

:hehe: