Freaky Gmail

[morgandawn]

I suddenly started getting Facebook messages sent to my gmail account. I traced it back and found another Morgan Dawn on Facebook - she signed up to Facebook using her new gmail account. But it turns out she was using my email address by mistake.  On google you own the full name even with dots and + and other symbols.

So morgandawn is the same as morgan.dawn as is m.organ.dawn

So if you use the wrong gmail address to sign up for another service, you will never have control of the other service (Facebook, banks, etc)

Since this is not a hack, just someone who does not know how Google works I tried to send her a Facebook message to tell her she needs to create a new gmail account  that does not use morgandawn and that she  needs to change her Facebook email address to that new gmail address.  Unfortunately, she does not accept Facebook messages from non-friends. But since I am being flooded with messages from her friends, I tracked down two who do have Facebook messaging enabled and asked them to have her contact me (at another email address). She probably wont be able to log into Facebook for a while.  And luckily she has only used my email for Facebook (I think).  I did make certain that my gmail recovery email is set to another address and that I have the appropriate gmail security.

Comments

[laurajv]

this is pretty much my life! you have all my sympathies, because it's really annoying.

[princessofgeeks]

Good Lord!!!

[elf]

So nice that Facebook doesn't bother requiring a confirmation before it starts sending stuff to an email address.

Does that mean you can log into her account? If so, you could do that and leave a message for her. Which I'm sure she'd find deeply disturbing. (I suppose that might be considered hacking by some TOS's.)

[morgandawn]

There really is no way to send a Facebook message to yourself. They do not operate like an email service. In any event, that feels too close to hacking. Someone else mentioned there was way to contact Facebook to alert them but it didn't work - there is also no support option ghat covers this situation. And no general support option.