Twitter keeps sending me the "Confirm your account" emails, although I never signed up

Question

It's annoying, I never gave them my e-mail address, and never intended to create an account.

They keep sending me the e-mails that go like:

{my real name},

Confirm your email address to complete your Twitter account. It's easy - just click on the button below.

Click on the link below or copy and paste it into a browser:

{link}

The link looks like this:

https://twitter.com/account/confirm_user_email/123123123/AB123-CD345-12345?t=1&cn={base64_string}%3D&sig={md5_hash}&al=1&iid={md5_hash}&ac=1&autoactions=1231231234&uid=123123123&nid=123+456

I'm used with randos getting my e-mail - I mean most spammers just try various addresses to see if those would work. But the fact that they somehow know my actual name as well is kind of creepy.

Again,

• I never went through their sign up process
• I never gave them my name & e-mail address
• They're sending me these emails every week, while if it's a real confirmation e-mail, I get it once and it normally says it's going to expire shortly
• There doesn't seem to be any way to unsubscribe from those, because even if I click some link or log in there they'd know that it is a working address

How did that happen? This can be considered as spam, right?

Answer 1

Maybe somebody you know who has your email address decided to sign you up. I mean, they'd have to know you or they wouldn't have your real name. Spammers aren't that clever. (Unless, of course, it's easy to parse your real name from your email address.)

I suppose it could be a phishing attempt. But that link looks legit to me. Did you look in the message headers or, assuming it's an HTML message, the source code of the message for anything hinky?

Assuming it really is from Twitter, I don't think you can really consider these spam, since it's a responsible company trying to confirm your account, even though you don't want one. If you really want them to stop you'll need to ask them to, even though, yes, then they'll know that there's really a person at that address. But so what?

Otherwise, from what I see you have two options:

• Arrange for such messages to "bounce" with the appropriate "no mailbox here" message. How to do that depends on your email provider (and is beyond the scope of this site).
• Use your email client's filtering tools to automatically send such messages to the trash. Then you never need to see them and presumably, after some time, they'll stop sending them. (Just don't forget to turn it off if you ever decide to sign up.)