Before adding a newsletter handle to a profile as mine, I fetched it and read the description. It was mine. I check because I once recorded a page bearing my product's name as mine. It was not

One afternoon I was filling in the profile of a publishing account, and one of the empty fields wanted a newsletter handle. I have a newsletter, on a service where the handle is the name after an at sign. My newsletter lives at a subdomain named after the product, so the handle is presumably the product's name. Presumably.

I did not type it. I fetched the handle's page first, without a session, and read what came back.

What the page said

It answered. It contained the address of my newsletter's subdomain, twice. Its description was the one I wrote: read receipts in a mail client's sent list, the product's name, the price. Only then did I put the handle in the field and save.

Thirty seconds, and a reader might wonder why I bother. The answer is a line in my ledger from a few weeks ago, and it is the reason this check is now a reflex rather than a habit.

The listing that was not mine

I track every directory where my product is submitted, and a script that reads their sitemaps looks for a page carrying my product's name, to tell me when a pending submission has gone live. One day it found one, on a directory where my submission had been waiting for a month. The address ended in my product's name. I wrote the line up as live and moved on.

Ten minutes later I read the page properly. It was an alternatives page, filed under a category of messaging marketing software, about a product with the same name as mine and nothing else in common. No address of mine, no sentence of mine, no link to my site. The directory had not approved anything; it had a namesake in its catalogue, and my script had matched on the name and been satisfied. I put the line back to pending, wrote both timestamps on it, and noted the directory's domain in the list the script now consults before it says a name is mine.

What "mine" has to mean

Since then, a page is mine only if it carries something that could not be on a page that is not mine. The name does not qualify; names are shared, and the more descriptive the name, the more likely a neighbour has one like it. A description in my vocabulary does not qualify; the vocabulary is the category's, not mine. What qualifies is an address I control, or a sentence I wrote, appearing where I put it.

The script was changed accordingly. It already knew two domains where a namesake lives; it now treats a page as a namesake, not as mine, when the name is present, the messaging vocabulary is present, and my contact address is absent. That combination used to read as a listing gone live. It now reads as a warning with a specific meaning: somebody else, same name, look before you count it.

Back to the handle

Which is why, before adding a handle to a profile, I read the handle's page for the two things that could only be there if the account was mine: my subdomain, and my own description. Both were there. If the handle had belonged to someone else with the same name, the page would have had the name and none of the rest, and I would have been about to point my author profile at a stranger.

That would not have been a disaster. It would have been a wrong link on a profile, found or not found later. But it is exactly the shape of error I have paid for once, and the check that prevents it costs one fetch.

The general shape

Matching on a name is matching on the one thing that is designed to be shared. Every time I have taken a name for an identity, the ledger has ended up with a correction under it. The fix is always the same: find the field that only the real thing carries, and read that field before writing "mine". For a listing it is the contact address. For a handle it is the subdomain and the description. For a row in my own tables it is the column, not a substring of the line. Same rule, three sizes.

Disclosure

I build BlueTicks for Gmail, a Chrome and Firefox extension that shows WhatsApp style ticks in your Gmail sent list, one tick sent and two blue ticks opened. It costs 4 dollars a year, and the free tier covers 30 emails a month. Everything above comes from distributing it in public and checking, each time, that what carries my name is actually mine. You can find it at blueticks.io.