2019-07-12 - Drowning in a Sea of SynoNym-Spam ---------------------------------------------- There are several other people who share my name living in this world, more than a small few. I know this, because I get their email. Way back in 2004, back when the internet wasn't the shithouse it has become, I received an email from a good friend of mine, a guy who was working at Google. The email was to let me know that Google were about to launch an email service, and directed me to a sign-up page. This didn't get me an email address, but it got me on a list. As it happened, I was rather high on that list (thanks to my friend) and when the public beta of Gmail was launched on 1 April 2004, I was immediately "in". This meant that I managed to secure my full name as a gmail address, with no numbers, or silly spellings, or nicknames, just my name. forename.surname@gmail.com. Now, I know I was privileged to get this, an in with the company, born of a long-ago shared interest in the works of Terry Pratchett and fecking around in Usenet. This meant, however, that the person with my name who lives in St. Albans, United Kingdom, didn't get the simple email address. He is (apparently) a passionate Remainer, and he has an interest in motorcycles. The person with my name who lives in a gated community in Miami also didn't get the simple email address. I kind of have some respect for this guy, because he has not one fuck to give about the communities ridiculous grass-length ordinances. Sure, it might cost him some money, but its not like he ever got the warning emails from Nancy. The guy with my name who started at Oxford last autumn seems to be a standup sort of guy. He did, after all, volunteer to spend the summer working with an NGO in Africa. I don't know if he managed to do that, though, as he probably idn't receive the email with the details on his vaccinations. There's another guy with my name who lives in Utrecht, a few years ago bought himself a house, and I hope he's happy there. I'm sure he was puzzled by the realtor finding him a house with a decent "play room dungeon", but maybe he's into that sort of thing? As for the guy with my name who lives in Puglia, I feel sorry for him that he probably missed his class reunion at the private school he attended in England. The guy with my name who lives in Australia, I can't even pretend to have anything nice to say about him. His pregnant girlfriend deserves better than a guy who spends $4,000 a month on sports betting. Thing is though, that each of these people have, at one stage or another, given my email address to realtors, old school associations, voluntary groups, homeowners associations, schools, universities, political organisations and so on and so on. None of these people has the unadorned firstname.surname@gmail.com email address, I know that, because I do. Recently, one of the many people with my name went and visited India. I didn't get their email from the airline or anything, so I know that they didn't use my address for that. What they did do, however, was use my email address when signing into the guest wifi at the Residency Towers in Chennai. Thing is, though, the Residency Towers, or maybe someone else who they used my email address to sign into something, sold that email address to someone else. Someone who sold that address to someone else. Someone who sells email addresses to spamhausen. In India. Since the 26th of May I have received 18,383 spam emails from Indian vendors to my gmail address. Eighteen Thousand, Three Hundred and Eighty Three That's *just* the ones that have gotten past gmails filters. There are so many that I simply cannot keep up. This address, that I've had for fifteen years, is unusable. Don't tell me that email is the original decentralised social network. Email is a wasteland, the same as the advertising-infected surveillance network