Comment by kagakuninja
1 year ago
I have a comcast email named after an old movie monster. Turns out that a former comcast customer once had the same account, and registered it with google (and others). Not only can I not use that address with google services, creating google calendar events using my email will sent the notification to the other guy (as a result, I created another email address for job interviews).
Every year I get several notifications that this guy has done something with his x-box, or registered a new device for something or other. It is absolutely nuts, and companies like Google refuse to let people like myself claim our own email addresses.
If you own the Comcast email address, how is he registering anything with it? Wouldn't he need access to the email to verify his accounts?
Because a shocking number of services don't actually require you to verify you control the email address. I'm talking about mainstream services like Spotify.
I'm in a similar situation, except in my case, the person providing the wrong email address never controlled it - it's firstnamelastname@gmail.com, which I signed up for when gmail was still invite only.
If I go to sign up for a service that someone else has signed up for with my email, I just do a password reset, and take control of the account. Either by transferring it to another email address that doesn't exist and then creating a new account, or if that doesn't work I just nuke the data.
He used to own the account, now I own it. I've tried resetting the google account password and the like, there seems to be nothing I can do.