Inheriting Email Addresses

Have you ever inherited an email address? It’s a very strange experience and it’s happened three times to me.

The first time was when I worked at a small dotcom company and was given the address dave@small-dotcom.co.uk. It turned out that the same address had been used by a former employee who had left some time earlier. He still had a number of mailing list subscriptions though and once my mailbox was active it soon filled up with information about things he was interested in but I wasn’t. Took me months to unsubscribe from them all.

Then when I started at this bank I was given the address david.cross@large-bank.com. In this case, the address was still warm from the Chicago-based research analyst of the same name who had left only a couple of weeks earlier. I get invited to all sorts of fascinating meetings in Chicago. Oh, and my previous incarnation played a weekly hockey game with some friends and each week a mail discussion would start about whose turn it was to bring the beers. They actually turned quite aggressive when I suggested that a geek from London wasn’t actually interested in their sporting activities.

The third time has just happened. Over the weekend I saw that davecross.co.uk was available, so I registered it and pointed it at the Magnum Solutions web site. But almost immediately I started getting spam to that domain. And then I got a couple of mailing list messages. It seems that someone has been using that domain fairly recently.

So I fancy a bit of domain name archeology. What can I find out about the previous owner of the domain? There seems to be nothing in Google’s cache and the Wayback machine doesn’t have anything either. Maybe I’ll just wait and see what mail turns up.

Does anyone else have any suggestions?