Duplicate email address?

CaroTheSparrow

Hi there, I logged on to my Amazon account yesterday evening to purchase a book and found that I had been logged in as someone else. I was signed in as a woman from Miami and all her details including purchases, full address and her credit card details. I checked I had signed in using the correct email address and password and I had. I was very shocked and worried and emailed Amazon explaining the problem.
It was only after that I started to wonder if she had my details?

Amazon emailed back this morning and asked me to contact my email provider and see if they had issued a duplicate email address. I have done so and I am still waiting on a reply back. It is a hotmail account and I wondered if anyone knew how common this was and if I should take this further with Amazon?

Many thanks for your help and sorry if this is in the wrong forum!

Caroline

Doooford

Hi Caroline,
Firstly, I think the easiest way to confirm that there isn't a duplicate email address is to check your account for emails that are to your over sea duplicate. If you haven't noticed anything odd in your email, I would imagine that this was a security glitch within Amazon. Very worrying:eek:

Darksun

It's almost certainly a glitch on the amazon side of things. It's very unlikely a provider would issue a duplicate email address (it causes all kinds of problems), and I'm pretty sure Hotmail never would, accounts there never expire to my knowledge, and even if they did I doubt they would allow names to be reused.

Plus, if you've been using amazon fine in the past with that login I fail to see how it could be due to a duplicate email address. And how would it even work, considering she would almost certainly have a different password?

Amazon are just looking for excuses if you ask me, or else really haven't though the issue through.

DVardysShadow

Possibly there could be a duplication of addresses with different capitalisation - which hotmail recognises and amazon does not.

fwor

DVardysShadow wrote: »

addresses with different capitalisation

While it's true that Amazon may be recognising capitals when they should not, it would not be possible for someone to get an identical Hotmail account by putting in capitals, because email addressing is case-insensitive, and always has been.

I'd go with Darksun's explanation - Amazon have screwed up somewhere and are blaming anyone but themselves.

Does it happen consistently, or just the once?

CaroTheSparrow

Having read the responses, I do agree that it must be Amazon. I have not been on my Amazon account for around two months and only logged on yesterday evening around 5pm and every time I logged out then logged back in, it would come up with the same woman's details until Amazon closed my account around 1am this morning.
I am really not satisfied with the response email Amazon sent me simply saying they have now closed my account and that it must be my email provider causing the problem. Should I take it further, or is it a hopeless case?


Thanks again for your help.

DVardysShadow

fwor wrote: »

While it's true that Amazon may be recognising capitals when they should not, it would not be possible for someone to get an identical Hotmail account by putting in capitals, because email addressing is case-insensitive, and always has been.

I'd go with Darksun's explanation - Amazon have screwed up somewhere and are blaming anyone but themselves.

Does it happen consistently, or just the once?

I agree with you to a point. Hotmail SHOULD not distinguish between upper and lower case, but personally, I would not rule it out solely on the basis that they would adhere to internet standards

tronator

fwor wrote: »

While it's true that Amazon may be recognising capitals when they should not, it would not be possible for someone to get an identical Hotmail account by putting in capitals, because email addressing is case-insensitive, and always has been.

That's not completely true. The local part of an email address IS CASE SENSITIVE according to RFC2821. However, most email servers are set up that they're treated as the same email address.

esuhl

Amazon's accounts will be completely separate from your email provider's, so if you logged in to Amazon with your username (which just happens to be the same as your email address) and were logged in as someone else, then I don't think your email provider would have anything to do with it.

Perhaps there's a problem with Amazon's servers, or maybe you're seeing a page that has been incorrectly cached on a network device or PC.

If you browse to a page that it's safe to assume the other person didn't visit (if you search for an obscure item and click the relevant link to view the details, for example) does it still show you as logged in as someone else? If not, the problem is likely to be due to caching, otherwise I'd guess it'd be something on Amazon's side.

You might want to try deleting your browser's cache (or "temporary internet files" in Internet Explorer) to see if that helps. Your ISP may also cache files for you, so you might want to speak to them to see if anyone else has reported similar problems.