Good Deed of the Week

[willowisp]

Since taking over my current email address at SUNY Oswego, I've been getting mail for the former owner. Nothing personal, but facebook notifications, software updates, and so on. I visited several facebook communities and sent the maintainers email to let them know the address was outdated, but got no replies (big surprise there). I tried to get in touch with facebook itself, but they make it very hard, if not impossible, to send in support requests.

Today I got mail from Verizon wireless saying that changes had been applied successfully to a certain phone number. After notifying Verizon via their website about the wrong email address, I called the number listed in the e-mail. She didn't know how to change email preferences in facebook, so I looked it up for her.

I forwarded all of the mail I've received so far to her Verizon address, and hopefully she'll be able to update such that Verizon itself will send the notifications to her new address. Hopefully also I'll stop getting her email, which will be nice when I'm waiting for something to arrive at that address -- I won't get so many false positives.

Comments

[jayfurr.livejournal.com]

I've never heard of a university recycling old student email addresses and giving them to new students. Weird.

[gconnor.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised that they re-used a previous email address... that's a pretty big breach of privacy. In any case, if you're annoyed by it, you should request a different address... my guess is that it's probably pretty easy to nuke and create anew with a different combination of letters.

good luck!

[missazrael.livejournal.com]

That's really nice of you to forward her email and call her, rather than just dump everything into the trash.

[studentbane.livejournal.com]

They reuse email addresses? [boggle] What an astoundingly, atrociously, mind-bendingly bad idea...