What do you call somebody who speaks two languages? Bilingual. One? American.

[cellio]

I get email sometimes that is presumably the result of somebody using my email address (erroneously or intentionally) to sign up for services like Facebook, Twitter, dating sites, etc. (Also the occasional hotel booking confirmation.)

Today I got email from Twitter with a subject line of something like "please confirm your account (account name that is not mine here)". I figured anti-confirming might be helpful (at least to me; don't know about the other guy), so I looked. The body of the message was in Portuguese.

The text that looked most like "not my account" passed muster with Google Translate, so I clicked -- and worried that I'd have to navigate a Portuguese confirmation page. But no! The page was in English. Yay; with luck that email stream will stop now.

So I guess when they sent the mail I thought I was that other person, and that account has a default language or a language setting, so they used it. But they weren't sure enough to also use Portuguese in the subject line. (Correct call: I wouldn't have opened it if it weren't in English.) And then when I indicated "nope" they either chose a language based on my IP address or just used English on the assumption that everybody on the web is used to that. I wonder which it was.

Making decisions about this stuff is probably harder than it first appears. I think they made all the right calls here (except they might have repeated the "nope, not me" link in English), and they didn't just pick one language and go with it.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

I'd have wondered if that was phishing email and would have ignored it. You're sure the link was to Twitter?

[cellio]

Oh, I popped that URL into a text editor to inspect it first; it was actually real. I also don't know what they might have been able to phish with just the information that this email address says it's not that Twitter account -- there was nothing else in the URL payload.