Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: What To Do With Misdirected Email?
An anonymous reader writes "My Gmail account is of the form (first initial).(middle initial).(common last name)@gmail.com. I routinely receive emails clearly intended for someone else. These range from newsletters to personal and business emails. I've received email with various people's addresses, phone numbers and even financial information. A few years ago I started saving the more interesting ones, and now have an archive of hundreds of emails directed at no less than eight distinct individuals. I used to try replying to the personal ones with a form response, but it didn't seem to help. To make matters worse, I frequently find I can't use my email to create a new account at various sites because it's already been registered. Does anyone else have this problem? Is there any good way to handle this?"
Get a real mail account and get off Gmail/Hotmail/other free service. You get what you pay for.
Is to change your name
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
Reset password, follow emailed link, and the account is now yours. And, bonus if it's already been paid for.
It's just common sense.
Just ignore them, or block the sender.
To make matters worse, I frequently find I can't use my email to create a new account at various sites because it's already been registered.
In that case, use an e-mail based password reset, set a new password, and done, as far as having registered for the site, or contact the site's support.
It's just common sense.
Unless you use a long random string as your email account name, you can still run into the same problem.
A bit of a joke... anyhow, if you have e-mailed them once offering (I assume) to forward misdirected mail, and they haven't bothered to answer, you're well within your rights to just set up an auto-delete using Gmail's filters. Good manners always is the first option.
If you're archiving and reading other people's misdirected e-mail you're a little bit creepy though, and I somehow doubt that you'll do this.
As for the rest of your problem, just set up a second Gmail address with a nonsensical middle name (first initial).turnip.(common last name)@gmail.com and have it forward to your "real" gmail address. Problem solved.
The great thing about G-mail, Facebook, and pretty much every site that isn't a bank, is that you can in fact make up a new name and have it work.
Three Squirrels
GMail allows all sorts of variations on your email address. Suppose it is j.m.smith@gmail.com. Then j.m.s.m.i.t.h@gmail.com or jmsmith@gmail.com are also valid versions and will come to your inbox. You can also add a + and any text after it: j.m.smith+no_spam_please@gmail.com will also work. Note that many places see "+" as an invalid email character, which means this isn't as useful as it might be.
"Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get" - Jerry Avins
I have a similar situation. My favorite one was when somebody set their internet connected security cameras to email the pictures to me. It looked like a nice house.
I've started just cancelling web site accounts. Just use the "lost password" links, change the password, and you own the account and can close it (If they actually allow anyone to actually close an account, lots of sites don't).
Well, I have a solution to your "email has already been registered" issue. Gmail will treat yourname+blah@gmail.com as the same address as yourname@gmail.com, both will go into the yourname@gmail.com account. Give the site an email address with a plus sign postfix like that and it should detect it as a new unique address. Some sites don't allow the plus symbol in email addresses (even though it's a valid character), so mileage may vary.
Yes, I have this exact same problem. However, I do not keep other people's e-mail.
I have been able to track down the correct people to whom the e-mails belong. In two cases, the people are lawyers and the e-mails contained either personal or confidential information. Another case is a general contractor, and I've received quotes from subcontractors, blueprints and general correspondence. In one case it was a confirmation of tickets for a theme park. (I debated showing up as soon as the park opened and claiming the tickets, but ethics got the better of me.)
These people now reside in my address book. I forward the e-mail in question over to them, and CC a copy to the sender.
One guy kept signing up for things using MY e-mail address instead of his. (name@isp.com vs name@gmail.com) He finally got the hint when *I* got the login information for his match.com account. (Ethics was still distracted by the theme park tickets case and lost.) Considering he was a single lawyer in San Francisco, I think my updates indicating he was gay, submissive, into BDSM and wealthy might've paid off. He seems to be extra careful in which e-mail address he uses now.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Why not make a password reset for them (unless they have "security questions") and change the email? Then you can create your own account. It is not your problem that some hobo can't enter their own e-mail address when registering accounts.
As for the unwanted email, tell the sender politely that they have sent personal/confidential information to you, an unsuspecting third party with a similar address. Then throw any future mail from them away. I have gotten some mail like this, but they all rectified their mistake and stopped sending to me. If they wouldn't, it isn't my problem (apart from pressing the "junk email" button in my MUA).
my email address is at gmail and is the same as my slashdot username. I get *average* amounts of spam, and zero redirected. That's with a five letter alias. And no, it isn't a random string.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
So I got somebody else's Facebook notifications. From time to time, I get some e-mail from Facebook stating the e-mail address has not been verified (with no description on what to do if you are not the intended recipient). I hoped this situation would die with time, but it is already five months since I got the first e-mail.
At some stage in the past, I also got some e-mails from ebay about a seller and a buyer discussing transaction e-mails. These ones did actually die.
In both cases, the e-mail account the messages should go was not the one I tend to give out. Google allows for different spellings on the same account. Your e-mail account may be achieved by following permutations:
JOHN.DOE@gmail.com
john.doe@gmail.com
johndoe@gmail.com
john.D.O.E@gmail.com
And this is not a bug, it is a feature.
I use my first initial+last name as my email address and get mail destined for a half dozen people. One person is an elderly gentleman in the midwest, I've given up any hope of getting him to stop giving out my email address. I only get a half dozen or so a month so it's not too bad.
I usually send a form letter to emails where it looks like a person might read the response (as opposed to newsletters, etc). For those emails where I don't think a human will read the response, I usually just hit the Spam button, unless there's a quick and easy to find unsubscribe link.
Sometimes when an email has a signature that says that if I receive a copy of the email in error I must delete all copies, in my reply, I ask whether they want to work on a time and materials basis or a fixed price $500 contract for me to track down and delete the email from all devices that it may have been delivered to (having emails go to a phone, tablet, several computers, imap download + backup means a fair amount of work to find and delete it everywhere). So far none have been willing to pay. I wonder if I could accept their demand to delete all copies of the email as implicit authorization to do the work and then bill them for the work.
yes... resumes where your email is "XxLegolaslover81xX@gmail.com" present a far more professional impression than something like "Steven.Alderson@gmail.com"
Yes, because no one, ever, in the history of the world, has had his or her e-mail address tied to enough things that what you suggest would be not just inconvenient, but a fucking stupid idea.
Man, talk about willfully ignorant jerk problems.
from: lauren
to: Ken
date: Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 10:15 AM
subject: Information About Loose Mansion: Ken REMOVED
12/18/2009
Hi Ken and Stephanie!
Thank you for your interest in Loose Mansion! We would love to host your wedding ceremony and reception, or possibly just your ceremony! As I mentioned, we'll have to wait until closer to your date before knowing if we can accomodate your afternoon ceremony on November 6, 2010. We are also available Saturday evenings, October 2 and 30, and November 13 and 20, 2010! Please know Loose Mansion is perfect for your group size!
Attached is general pricing and policy information. I will put together a more specific estimate for you now that I know more about your plans, and will send that in a separate email shortly!
In case you haven't had a chance to fully explore our website, please know that it contains a wealth of information about our events, including slide videos, photo galleries, guest comments, and answers to frequently asked questions.
We're proud to say that the Kansas City community recently voted Loose Mansion, "Best Venue in Kansas City" on the KMBC TV A-List Website! To see reviews and photos on the A-List Website, please visit: REMOVED.
We know that planning a wedding event can be overwhelming to many people...but, not to us! Our expert staff will ensure you have an amazing event, and we'll make planning simple and fun!
Warm Regards,
Lauren REMOVED
Event Manager
My response....
date: Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 2:09 PM
subject: Re: Information About Loose Mansion: Ken REMOVED
Lauren,
Thank you very much for your information about the Loose Mansion. While the information was rather intriguing, I'm afraid that I do not know this Stephanie who you are hooking me up with? I'm very surprised to hear that I am getting married as well, and this was quite a shock to my current wife.
Also, Kansas City seems a rather long drive from my current residence in Maryland. I'm afraid that while Loose Mansion sounds wonderful, and I'm sure this will be an excellent event, I don't believe I will be able to attend.
To Mark, Brett, and Seth, whom I have CC'd on this email. Please guys, NO MORE BLIND WEDDING DATES. My wife does not appreciate it.
Thanks,
Ken
PS: Lauren, you may want to try to get in contact with the OTHER Ken, who is actually getting married. Sorry, I have no idea who he is.
~Ken
This. As for misdirected email, i had a similar problem a couple of years back when someone decided to use my email (no real name) for his facebook account. As it seems email confirmation is optional and the guy made a full profile, added friends etc xD
You mean all non 14-17 year old boys are out of their mind?
Get off my lawn.
my gmail is commonfirstnamepsuedocommonlastname@gmail.com and i have this problem all the time. i have on occasion looked up the person using my email by searching the phone book for people with my name around the address of the local businesses and people that frequently email me... usually it appears the people are 60+ but when someone used my email to start a twitter account it was someone in his 30s based on the picture he used on the account. i did like someone above said and used email based password reset and posted on the account that the person was using the wrong email address and that the account should be removed from their friend list or whatever twitter does.
in general i am really annoyed by the email i constantly get, though the other week i did get some tickets to an indoor trampoline place that sounded fun... sadly the place was 2500 miles away. most the people using my account i think are leaving off the random number or swapping out a _ for an inconsequential . that leads me to getting their emails.
I have had several emails from job applications to registrations on shopping sites to my gmail. I reply telling the person that they have contacted the wrong person, and advise them to contact the intended recipient by another means.
I once got a schedule for a church rota for somewhere in the states, and when I replied saying I wasn't the person in question they asked me to forward it to them! I'm not quite sure how they expected me to do this.
This misaddressing of emails is probably really confusing the NSA email contact database though.
Someone was registering for sites using my GMail address without the dot I use. They registered for a site and an email came through confirming their details, including phone number.
I phoned up and asked him politely to not use my email address.
He accused me of hacking his account he has used for 2 years.
I explained I have had the account since GMail was 'invite only'.
Got swore at loads, so hung up and set up a rule so that mail without the dot is ignored and trashed. Problem solved!
from here it looks as if you might have to take your counting skills off your CV
Just send a CV with an e-mail address like these:
it.does.not.come.easy@gmail.com
fucking.master.of.the.universe@gmail.com
sexybunny1990@gmail.com
fuckalot@gmail.com
These examples say something about you that you might not want to transmit on your CV.
If your e-mail address has been registered by someone else just have a password reset request sent to the address so you can take control of the account. I did this when someone registered a Facebook account with my email address and I got tired of the FB spam and friend request notices.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
I have the same problem. There's at least two dozens distinct individuals who have had emails erroneously addressed to my inbox.
For automated emails that offer an easy link to unsubscribe or dissociate my email address from that account, I use the provided link. Those are pretty easy.
Sometimes people register for paid services that send a monthly bill and it comes to my email address. They may or may not be of English origin. For these, I just add a filter or rule to my email provider or client to just delete them or move them. Communicating with someone, possibly in another language, possibly requiring lots of bureaucratic red tape, is not really worth it. If they care about it enough, it's their responsibility to fix it.
The most annoying case is when a large group of friends start an email thread with a whole bunch of different people in the "to" or "cc" field. Asking them to correct the email address is pretty much an exercise in futility, since all it takes is one person to hit 'reply to all' and your email address is back on the thread. For these, I just block every recipient on the thread.
I've never had the problem of someone already having registered my email. One way around it would be to set up another email address that just forwards to your actual email address.
http://xkcd.com/1279/
1) If I can track down the person, I try to contact them and let them know they have they're using the wrong email
2) If it's a real person sending the email (like when one person have out my email for his house refinance stuff), I email the person back asking them to contact via phone or whatever the person and tell them they have the wrong email address
3) If a person in #2 does so and i keep receiving new emails because the person doesn't learn, I ask someone again like in #2, though this time I recommend they they stop doing business with, or throw out the job application, or whatever because the person is so stupid that they can't even figure out their own address
4) I've been know to find the person via their relatives and ask them to inform the person that they're using the wrong email
5) For sites where registrations were done, I simply go to the site, click Forgot Password, get a reset, go in, and change the information so it's no longer to my email address. Often I change the address to STOP+USING+[MY+ADDRESS]@gmail.com. Sometimes logging in to the account has the benefits of getting me their address and/or phone number to contact, which I've done.
6) In cases where I've changed the email address and they've had tech support change it back to mine, I go back in to the account and change ALL the info to mine, so now it become my account and they can no longer use it or get any access to it.
I use a personal domain for my actual mail, but have accounts at all the major free mail sites too, just for spam or whatever.
I started getting mail to my Yahoo account which wasn't spam, but clearly not for me, as part of a group of people participating in a medical imaging conference. For a while I just blew it off, but eventually the organizer mailed my actual non-yahoo address by mistake as well. So I decided to be swell about it and let her know that I'm not the person she's trying to reach. She said "Oh, I'm sorry, I meant to do (yourname)@yahoo.com, thanks!", and so I told her "well no, that's also me, sorry". I proceeded to tell her an address which would work for her intended recipient (work email for the person she was trying to mail, who isn't me).
Basically she refused to believe she has been sending to the wrong address, and said "I had no idea two people could have the same email address, I guess Yahoo must allow it or something". At that point, I gave up and just let it go again. It's not high-volume enough to matter.
I like music
They can't reply or get your reply because they can't log in, I went so far as to track one person down via an ad sent to them, I have also received someone's complete information, SSN, etc.
In the end I just drag them to the trash.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
My Yahoo email address (yeah, I know, and I'm moving away from it - I've had the account since 1995 or 1996, but this latest mail interface redesign is finally getting me motivated to stop using it for anything other than junk mail) often receives legitimate mail intended for other people. My favorite incident so far was when a wife tried to email their password spreadsheet to her husband, but sent it to me instead. I let her know of the error, and she thanked me and said her husband was pretty pissed at her for the mistake. I deleted the message, though: if their accounts were broken into, I wanted to be able to say, "I deleted the message and the attachment."
I usually just ignore the messages and delete them. If it keeps happening I'll often respond and let them know they have the wrong person. I really want to slap the lawyers that have "if you are not the intended recipient of this email, delete it immediately!" at the bottom - I mistakenly received a message with that at the bottom once, so I responded per their directions and included a bill for my fee of $200 for the service. I never heard from them again, and if their little disclaimer was legal than my bill probably was too. I wonder if my point got through...probably not.
I would be careful about saving anything that could open you up to liability - the password spreadsheet above is a perfect example. The odds are excellent you'd never have a problem saving something compromising, but it only takes one idiot, and even if you're innocent, the hassle wouldn't be worth it.
"Someone else has already used my email" - how is this even a problem?
Heh. Obviously some email names would be inappropriate for certain situations. That's why I have no less than 400 separate email addresses. It also makes it harder for various TLA groups to positively connect one email to another...not that I'm paranoid or anything...
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
I own a very short domain name where the first part of the name is the same as many organization's name.
e.g., if it was example.com then others have example.co.uk or exampleinc.com etc and I get a LOT of their email because I wildcard my domain for email and people just assume that example.com will work
As I get them, I add a postfix rule to reject that specific username but I still get stuff, including very confidential stuff.
I haven't advised these organizations because I fear they'll just turn around and try to dispute to get my domain or accuse me of criminal interception or whatever. So I just delete them and they can wonder why they never got a reply.
Rule #1: "Email is not a guaranteed service."
Rule #2: "Email is not secure. Stop sending confidential stuff through it"
I had various problems with email address collisions as well. Then when I had to change ISPs, I decided to get my own domain name. It's a little different when you own your own email address. If you register a domain, you can be firstname@lastname-variation.net or such. Then you just forward from your actual email host to the registered email address. It's only a few dollars a year. Then YOU decide who gets an email address for your domain, and you can have whatever policy you want to avoid collisions.
I have the same issue. Someone signed up their Kohl's rewards account under my e-mail address, and I get 10-15-25 dollar coupon codes all the time. My entire work wardrobe has only cost me about $18 in the past year.
You actually need to come to /. to ask for assistance in this matter?
Y'all are missing out on a good time.
I have a gmail account with the first name dot last name set up. As you can imagine I get quite a few messages for people who forget to tell their friends about their middle initial. However from context, I can often tell which of my name-sharing buddies the email was intended for. Over the years I have actually gotten to know a couple of them, which is fun.
I don't bother trying to tell the senders about the mistakes, they usually do nothing, oddly. The recipient, however, tends to get on it effectively.
It's quite interesting do talk to them. What's in a name?
In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it. -John Archibald Wheeler
It's not my job to solve their communication problems.
Man, talk about "white people problems".
I'm pretty sure a bunch of people in China & India encounter the same "common last name" problem. And last I checked they aren't supposed to check the "white, white, lilly white" box on any forms.
Setup a rule in gmail that autoreplies to anyone whose email address on it emails you with a bounce message saying they've emailed the wrong person and tags and archives the email. When you get a message intended for the wrong person add the sender to the rule (just their email address, the domain or whatever).
...an exotic name like my family name. I constantly get erroneous emails intended for someone else, sometimes these emails are of a very private nature, so this isn't very good. One of them was involving a personal gift to someone in my family and it was the lawyer who got my email address instead. Another time, it was the tax offices - and they even included the tax return documents with detailed information about their income. I've been sent several personal documents that should never have been seen by anyone other than the intended recipient. I don't think this is Googles mistake though, it's just people - being people.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
But it's not an real problem for them, that's the difference. They just change their e-mail address and move on.
They won't take your email address off if some uses it by mistake, you are stuck getting perpetual updates
A few months back, I received an email on my Gmail from the agent of an NFL player. The agent was apparently looking to help his client negotiate a contract, and conveniently attached a draft of said contract. I went and updated the NFL player's Wikipedia entry stating that he was going into free agency and looking for a gig. Hey, I could have done a lot worse, like placing bets using inside info or something.
Many, many years ago, I had the screen name "File" on AOL. There was some sort of ancient productivity suite (maybe Notes, or 123, or something) where you would cc a message to "file" in order to keep a local copy, and many AOL users presumed their email service worked the same way. Oh sweet Christ, the things that landed in my inbox there over the years...
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
My GMail (and Yahoo! as well) username is (first name)(middle name)(last name), all fairly common [in fact at my current employer there are multiple matches of (first name)(last name), and my father has the same (first name)(last name) as well], and I have not had this problem with either service. Perhaps using initials instead of full names is part of it; or your last-name may have different demographic connotations.
I did, however, recently have that problem with a Comcast account. When the tech visited our home for installation, he created an account (first name)(last name) @comcast.net . I didn't actually give it out anywhere, yet within a few months it was filled with a hundred or so messages for someone in another state. I did try responding to one item that seemed moderately important, and whoever got the response [the help-desk of some organization] didn't seem to grasp that I had no connection with the intended recipient. Since I hadn't advertised it anywhere, it was easy to change the username, to (my first initial)(wife's first initial)(my last initial)(wife's last initial)(string of digits) @comcast.net. While this address appears to have been reused, apparently Comcast no longer allows address reuse; I tried using a previous ID that I had used a long time ago, and it was not available.
Since you ask for advice, I recommend two courses of action:
Same problem, protocol is the same.
Don't Touch It.
Is it real or just a spoofer being clever?
I run into this all the time... I don't have a particularly common last name, so I have @gmail.com, however, if you take the first letter off my last name, you apparently get a somewhat more common last name, so everyone with that last name whose first initial is the same as the first letter as my last name thinks that my gmail account is theirs.
I'm surprised by the number of companies that do not require validation to create an account. Most times I unsubscribe them. Some times I contact the vendor when they keep sending me stuff. Some times I just take over the accounts. It's very frustrating... I have had people try to open bank accounts with my email address. I had 3 different people buy cars using my email address this summer (and the car dealers do not remove you no matter how many times you call). My favorite one though is a woman in Nebraska who orders from Victoria's Secret once a month or so... I've contacted her and asked her if she needs to consider a diet since I've noticed her sizes are going up based on her purchase history. She wasn't too happy about it, but refuses to stop putting my email address in.
If its from a person its easy to block and delete. I would not feel any responsibility to an email sent to me by mistake like if it was snail mail. For websites I would try to get control of them. The most annoying would be the additional spam emails.
This is why I don't use my name in email address.
Also, note that the periods in your name don't make any difference. Email addressed to Something.Else@gmail.com, Some.ThingElse@gmail.com and SomethingElse@gmail.com go to the same mailbox. It is part of the email specifications to do that, allow extra periods, and gmail implemented it correctly while some other email providers did not. If you are certain that everyone will use the periods just as you specified then it is pretty easy to add a filter which separates the mail into different folders based on the position of the periods. That can automatically filter email addresses that aren't formatted to your liking.
I don't see what the big mystery is here. Misdirected (non-spam) e-mails should be sent back to the sender, as has long been done with physical mail.
I routinely reply to such e-mails with something along the lines of...
"It appears that you have e-mailed me by mistake. I am not the person addressed in this e-mail."
The sender can then track down the correct recipient or not, but at least they're aware it didn't reach the person intended. It's the considerate thing to do.
As far as making accounts at new sites just try and log in using your email address and reset the p/w. You can then go and change any of the info you need to to yours. I had one guy that tried to squat on my email address and I would get all his frequent flyer notices tons of assorted spam. I finally was able to get him to stop when his dentist and doctors started emailing me appointment confirmation stuff. I called the doctors told them, "I was a different John Doe but the email address they had was mine. If the idiot John Doe didnt want me to start canceling and rescheduling his appointments for a time that was better for me then he needed to fix the email issue on his end. oh and by the way let him know that I was going to the beach next month and planning on using all those frequent flyer miles to get the airline tickets and it looked right now that there were enough points to cover the hotel also." Nothing prior had worked but I never got another wrong email once I called his docs that day.
IMHO the golden rule comes into play here; if I sent a message to the wrong address, or a message meant for me went to the wrong address, I'd want the recipient to notify the sender.
I generally write back to the sender with a form message to the effect of "Sorry, wrong email address. I am not the person you are looking for." then delete the message. That works almost all the time.
If the message was sent to a group, I reply to all, so everyone (hopefully) updates their address books.
If the message had confidential info (from lawyers, bankers, etc) I'll definitely write back, and as quickly as possible.
For automated emails, I just delete them and/or mark them as spam.
Funny story, for about a year I got email from a Australian rugby group. At first I responded as I describe above. it worked for a while but my addresses cropped back into their mailing list a couple of times. By the end, I wrote a long message (to the effect of "I'm really not the person you want, stop sending me mail, update your addresses, please please take me off your list!"). That finally fixed it, they said sorry, and in recompense they offered me free tickets to rugby games if I'm ever in town. I have no plans to go to Oz, but if I ever do I intend on taking them up on that offer, if only to see my doppelganger.
In the 1800's, and 1900's with the reduced cost of long-distance travel and the increase of the urban lifestyle, most people lived in communities from thousands to a few millions in size and routinely used two names like "Robert Johnson" and had a middle name to use rarely only to resolve ambiguity such as on official documents and such. Some people use their middle names almost like a password - reluctantly using the name for fear of identity theft.
IMO, starting in the 2000's, the advent of the global Internet community, population 7+ billion, has rendered the two-name system obsolete. I suggest that in the modern Internet age, use of three names should be routine. The DNS system is actually a good start on allowing people to acquire and keep a globally unique name. Unfortunately, due to the top-level-domain silliness of the DNS system, there could be "robert-millford-johnson.com" and "robert-millford-johnson.net" etc.
Maybe there should be a top level domain specific to personal names - .name for example. At birth, each person could have a unique domain name assigned to them by their parents. A newborn's birth certificate might show the domain robert-millford-johnson.name, thus guaranteeing the person a unique name throughout life. If people really want to have a password as part of their name, they could have a fourth name not included in the URL.
I've often thought the same thing, having a unique name was so convenient!
Now, though, I'm not so sure, as the proliferation of personal information available to anyone means that I don't get lost in the sea of common names.
The weirder your name... the more likely you are to publish an important paper.
I call that abuse... It is illegal in my country (having a password does not authorize you to enter, similar to finding a key on the street). Second: It is unnice to other people who make a mistake.
Would you do that to someone you know?
In a heartbeat, if it meant they quit registering for crap and giving my email address isntead of their own email address.
sudo mod parent up
I frequently find I can't use my email to create a new account at various sites because it's already been registered.
Most sites have a "forget password" button that will send an email to your emailaddress to reset the password. Just use that.
I wonder which sites these are, since most sites require you to confirm a subscription by email as well.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I am 28. I routinely try responding to the personal e-mails. Once, someone thanked me for my unsolicited advice about teenage years. Another time I was asked out on a triple date. (Yes, they lived in my town.. and I did decline.) But in general, they appreciate it. The ones from businesses I ignore, including hair cutting appointment reservations. (People don't know their own e-mail addresses sometimes.)
Don't pick on me for using AOL. We were all new to the internet once and had to start somewhere. Anyway, John@aol.com had the quote in his profile "I get a lot of wrong-number email."
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
You're in a deep load of shit if the email contains:
I mean it's like strictly prohibited and you should delete this e-mail from your system and whatever you do you should not disseminate, distribute or copy this e-mail under penalty of death apparently!
I usually respond with "Make me! :-p" but I'd really love to find a web site where I can post these...
I have the same format email address. My name is unusual enough that I think there are only about three other people giving out my address though. Mostly they are individuals and small businesses emailing me, and I've had good luck replying with the information that the person they are seeking isn't at my address.
My favorite, though, was this one particular guy who gave out my address dozens of times. I emailed his proper address, I replied to all his business emails.. he still kept doing it though. Then one day, he signed up for one of those identity theft protection services.. with my email. The temptation to royally screw with him was almost overwhelming, but I didn't. He eventually stopped sending me stuff, though.
Evil will always win, because Good is DUMB
Buy your own Domain. It's ~$10/yr.
Setup a web server. It's free to $10/yr or so.
Have total control. Works.
My gmail address is lastname@gmail.com, so it this probably happens every 3 months or so. Due to this, plenty of people intending to do slastname or plastname screw up and it goes to me. What I tend to do is if it looks important (hotel confirmation, the budget notes of some organization), I will attempt to forward it to the person intended. If I am unable to do that, I will respond to the person sending it and advise that they have the wrong address. If its not important (website registration), I'll usually ignore it.
Funnily enough, I received notification from a car dealership asking me how I was doing with my new car, etc. I recognized the name on it and called my brother to congratulate him.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
I got this. Some guy obviously has the same name as me and lives in the same country. His friends added me to their private "funny racist jokes" mailing list. I blocked them, wondering how they hell they got my address. Then I got a personal email to the same address and, halfway through, realised that it wasn't for me.
I emailed back to point out the mistake and then deleted it. I never got a reply. But occasionally he obviously still used that address to sign up for something and never noticed that he didn't get the email.
For every email I got that said I've signed up for it (and it's a genuine website), I forcibly unsubscribe (Facebook twice). Everything I'm "already" registered on, I force a password re-issue, log in and delete the account. Every "confirmation" email, I just delete. I don't know who the guy is and don't care about him not getting his emails, because neither does he or he'd put the right email address on the bloody signups.
He stopped using it after a few months, but I got everything from hotel and hire car booking confirmations to porn signups in his name (I didn't unsubscribe those, it was free porn junk and might have just been ordinary spam so I didn't take the chance and just Junk'ed them).
After a while, he must have noticed. I haven't had one in a long while.
I see no obligation to do anything for them, and if I didn't sign up personally it's almost impossible to distinguish genuine idiot from random spam. I deleted anything that I didn't order (e.g. bookings) because, again, it might just be spam and I'm damned if I'm opening a PDF.
As far as I'm concerned, it's up to him to use the right email. When he doesn't get something important because he used the wrong email, it's up to him to notice and contact the company to change it. And I think three or four things that looked important were enough for him to learn his address properly.
But I'll be fucked if I'm going to investigate it and chase him down just because he can't remember his email right after telling his friends (who should be telling him) and the hassle of unsubscribing the crap sent that he never even noticed didn't come through to him.
Rather more seriously is that I required so many years to get off a distribution list for a hospital in New Zealand, where a doctor worked who was also named Michael Crawford. Whenever a particularly ill patient required extra attention from the medical staff, an announcement was broadcast to this list, but Dr. Crawford never got the message.
Please mail me URLs of software employers.
You seriously expect me to remember if it was 2010 or 2011? What do you think I am, a historian or something?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Never give your Gmail account to anyone. Or any real final account. Get a free forwarding account at Spamgourmet.com and give every site that you want to sign up for a unique address. That way you can cut them off when they start to spam or when they get hacked and their database is stolen. And you can tell where spam from third parties came from if it comes through a spamgourmet address. Great people. Completely free anti-s[am service. And I can tell from the way that I structured the email address that I gave them that they have never abused the information that I gave them.
I've even had close friends get hacked and my email address harvested from them. So it is better if all of your friends send through their own unique spamgourmet addresses to reach you, that way you can change one address if an email gets harvested and not have to abandon your mail mail account and notify hundreds of contacts of the change.
As to the eight or more people that you are getting mail for, I doubt that you can do much to help them. They and/or their contacts are clearly clueless. Just remember the old saying: No good deed goes unpunished.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
new burn-phone once. That was less than fun: "Hmm, who would forge an email address and buy a burn-pho....crap crap crap crap"
for using your real name for an email address. best username for an email address is pseudorandom 'pronounceable' combination of characters that come up with zero hits on a web search.
I 'stole' my domain name (in a they didn't bother to renew the domain name in time sort of way...).
In my defence the address is my real name and I already had the .net / .co.uk and .org domain names just not the .com
Found out 1h after registering and sorting out the email that it was owned by a Developer/Real Estate agent in Canada before me.
I gave up responding after 6 months or so of contacting the senders to inform them I'm not the person they are looking for. Also telling them they should use the telephone to contact the guy and get his new address!
After a few months I got bored and I started to reply to emails about a particular $1,000,000 development for a conservative party member they were trying to get a tender for:
Hey Paul
Love the plans for the project. Client has a couple of alterations.
Can you amend the plans to include:
Large 4ft deep jacuzzi in the living room.
'Adult' Games room in basement. (wants the place soundproofed and optional "adult dungeon" fixtures and fittings with a double bed down there.)
Oh can you fit celling to floor French doors in the toilets facing the decking at the fount of the house. (prospective buyer is a pit of a perv..)
Thanks
[insert my name here]
Was not really surprised it took them nearly 4 weeks to notice I wasn't the developer in Canada but a guy in the UK (Well I did tell them 2 or 3 times before this I wasn't their guy!)
I still get emails about projects, prospective site availability and invitations to the Canadian conservative party conferences every once and a while but they get spammed and trashed.
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
Quite a few years ago I had an e-mail account with my ISP, and it received an e-mail from a lawyer to their client, which contained some personal information. I replied, to let them know that it hadn't reached the intended recipient. Shortly thereafter, that e-mail account stopped working for me.
I hadn't used the account for anything even remotely important, so I didn't bother trying to get it back.
I get emails from various stores, tourism boards, and the NRA. Since many of these are ostensibly 'legit', GMail often fails to spam filter them (at least initially). Any mail list that doesn't do a confirmation before subscribing a user is evil.
...and now I have TWO accounts for Sears.
I still won't buy anything from them though.......
I have a feeling you're dealing with the same issue I am. I've reported it to Google, but years later it still isn't fixed.
I have a normal username (made up example: abcde@gmail.com). This other user apparently has "a.bcde@gmail.com". I don't know if they get any mail at all, but I get lots of theirs. I even tested it, sending an email to my address with randomly-inserted periods, and they all end up coming to me.
There's some cow in Oklahoma who shares the same last name and first initial as me, but yet manages to give MY gmail address to all of these various opt-in mailings. Consistently. Spanning years. Not sure how someone can be consistently wrong.
Congratulations, you're probably a victim of identity theft, and you don't even know it yet!
Why, in 2014, are you casually using your real name anywhere online that you aren't forced to? You should be using a pseudonym or going entirely anonymous as much as possible.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Just like the subby I have the same problem. Initially I tried telling senders that they had sent their mail to the wrong person. I received messages from family members talking about personal family issues and I contacted the senders to tell them I was not the person they were looking for and they should contact that person directly and get the correct address. Then I started receiving business mails and automated responses to hotel bookings and online orders for products.
I finally had enough. Now when I get an email addressed to me saying I signed up for some online service, I take control of that account and change the password to random characters. I don't delete the account, because I don't that person to go back and create another account with my email address. I've also cancelled hotel reservations that were sent to me and cancelled online orders as well. I've received business correspondence....it looked like the person had contracted some work to be done...and I replied back that their work was complete crap, not what I asked for and to do it again.
As far as I'm concerned...if you can't get your email address correct in this day and age (it's not the 1980's anymore, computers aren't new "magic" devices) then too f*&^ing bad.
damn.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I have my firstname@gmail.com (early betatester) and get a LOT of these. For a long time. I used to reply these mails and notify the sender, and some times even logged in with the various passwords I received by error and changed the registered email on these sites to te intended recipients real address (fun with some detective work sometimes...) but I've pretty much given up replying now, due to the volume, and just mark it as spam.
sudo mod parent up
Anonymous Coward is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
alias sudo="echo make it yourself #" ; # https://pipedot.org/~stderr & http://soylentnews.org/~stderr
it's spam.
But what about the 12 people who have given him LinkedIn endorsements for "counting"? What about them, huh?
Always, always respond to them.
Always be nice about it.
Why?
Well... last year I got yet another misaddressed email, and as usual I responded to it and the situation snowballed and some lovely people had a whip around and flew me from Ireland to Boston to go to the party to which they had accidentally invited me...
Luckily I had a visa waiver still in place and had some spare vacation days...
One of the craziest things to ever happen to me... I'm hard pressed to think of anything crazier. I met one of the fellows with the same name as me, ate some good food, met some great people...
Thanks guys!
...like these which I have had:
I once got an e-mail to my firstname.lastname gmail that a guy had intended to send to himself from his job. He had forgotten that that is not his e-mail address - not surprising since the guy was such a moron that he then asked me if I could forward what he had sent to his own, correct address even though the content was still in my reply to him.
And more frequently, I get signups to dating sites (often paid for) and based on the profile it must be the same guy doing it over and over again and thus I've been very tempted to add to the guy's profiles that one of his traits is a very bad memory. I also have reason to believe that the guy has "gotten married" in Thailand due to a few confirmations of flower deliveries to some Thainame SameLastNameAsMineAndHis
I've also obtained registration codes for some shareware but not such software that I need :p
And finally, I might have missed a good networking opportunity and party when I decided not to print out the invitation and go to a reunion for some M.Scs that had graduated before my parents had even met....
I just wonder what the legal implications would be if I "played along" for a while. Could I have plausible deniability by pretending to be a little obtuse and thinking that the e-mails really were meant for me...
Putting dots in your email address does nothing for gmail. I found out it strips out the dots so firstinitial.lname.stupidthing@gmail.com is the same as firstinitiallnamesnumber@gmail.com. This means that the person who puts in the dots is basically forwarding their email to someone else. Support at gmail just shrugs their shoulders, sad thing is when you sign up for a gmail account using a name like that it is accept as unique but then the dots are stripped out. A perfect example is me where I get the email for a teacher in Texas, including her maintenance requests, email from her friends, etc. I tried sending her email and it just comes to me. I then email gmail support and I get "so sorry nothing we can do". So consider where your emails are going and change your email account name.
And finally, I might have missed a good networking opportunity and party when I decided not to print out the invitation and go to a reunion for some M.Scs that had graduated before my parents had even met....
I just wonder what the legal implications would be if I "played along" for a while. Could I have plausible deniability by pretending to be a little obtuse and thinking that the e-mails really were meant for me...
Always go to things you are invited to! :)
Do not pretend to be the person though
If your email's already been registered somewhere, try the "forgot your password?" link? It'll send the new password out to, duh, your email.
Likewise, you can stick on a +whatever on the end of your userID to make it into a "different" email address (and this will also help you know which websites are leaking your email.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Your new Google email address shall be n.n@gmail.com, where n belongs to {x|x is 128 bit hex number where the first numeral is in {a,b,c,d,e,f}}
That should do it.
You need to ask /. for that?
Either, you delete it, or you put a standard "wrong address, return to sender" sentence on a macro and reply with that.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I usually do the courteous thing and reply to the sender - there have been 3 that I have gotten off an on for a few years. I usually reply and copy the likely intended recipient if I can figure it out. One time the sender replied back (to both of us) and was rather snippy saying it wasn't her fault. I found the info on a facebook page that she said used, turned out she was wrong - so I pointed it out kindly along with a link back and wished them luck at the event they were planning. The intended recipient was so thankful that she sent me a $10 starbucks e-gift card. So do good and you might occasionally get rewarded.
I have a really old freemail account with a simple handle for a username rather than anything based on my real name. I can't remember getting email intended for someone else, but I regularly get tons of new mailing list subscriptions and account registrations. Facebook, other freemail accounts, web-based games, about everything you can imagine and in just about every language you can imagine. For mailing lists I'd just go and unsubscribe, then send the site owner a nastygram about verifying subscriptions in the future; for the registrations, I'd reset the password and change the user profiles to something I hoped was embarrassing. Serves 'em right for using someone else's email address. Mostly I just don't bother anymore and let that account fester since I have plenty of others (some courtesy of chumps registering with my email address) to use.
The NSA must be really confused about me though.
I share a name with an advisor to a senior member of the US Military. I repeatedly receive confidential mails related to operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. I replied to my namesake telling him this but it hasn't stopped and has been going on for years now. I forward the more interesting stuff to Wikileaks.
When I receive misdirected E-mail, it almost always results from someone selecting the wrong David or wrong Ross from their address book. That is, both the intended recipient and I are both known to the sender. The sender's address book is organized by names, not by E-mail addresses.
I used to get phone calls in the middle of the night for a David Ross who was an attorney, either in private practice or in the District Attorney's office. The caller would be drunk and picked out the wrong David Ross from the phone book. Again, this was a problem with my name, not with my phone number.
There are apparently many, many David Rosses. I have met two others face-to-face, both times in doctors' offices. I have exchanged E-mail with several others. I even created a Web page about this situation at http://www.rossde.com/Ross.html.
How do I handle misdirected E-mail? On the first occasion, I reply quoting the original message. I tell the sender they have the wrong David Ross. If there is one of those caveats about condfendiality and deleting misdirected messages, I also inform the sender that such warnings are unenforceable, that the sender must bear full responsibility for ensuring correct addressing of such messages.
On subsequent instances from the same sender, I use a small application that returns the message in a format that indicates the stated E-mail address is invalid. That is, the message will appear as if bounced. If that does not work, I finally threaten to make any subsequent messages public by posting them on a newsgroup.
I have had this problem for 20 years: I have an original aol.com address (from when it was AppleLink PE) with no appended numbers, etc., and I get email for other people constantly.
Some of the email is serious stuff - receipts for charges, bank confirmations, etc. Evidently these people don't know their own email addresses.
Over the years I have tried several ways to resolve this, including letting the senders know (they typically accuse me of hacking their intended targets email or finding something else to accuse me of), letting the targets recipient know (its not hard to find them, since I know their base email address), attempting to filter, etc., and I finally just had to give up and just let the account become a bit bucket.
takedown notice !
Why should I change? They're the ones who suck.
Of the form 'xy.com' for some characters x and y, that I bought in 1993.
Even then, I got a lot of spam. Things I got:
Lots of resumes. A popular temping agency used 'xyab.com', so
I got several a day by 2000. I also somehow wound up on e-mail
lists from Pratt & Whitney. Nothing I could do ever stopped them,
although some of their corporate security types might have had
fits if they'd known. Lots of strange personal e-mails. Lots of
misdirected traffic for xy.org and xy.edu. Lots and lots and lots
of spam.
By the time I sold it three or four years ago, the 150 MB catchall
for it was filling in less than an hour.
"I frequently find I can't use my email to create a new account at various sites because it's already been registered"
If someone else created an account for you, then you request a password reset, and reclaim YOUR account which uses YOUR email.
Reply with "Did you intend to send this to a college student in (whatever state ) state?"
If it is a person-2-person email, most every time will get a response of "No, but thanks - I'll call them and get the correct e-mail address".
Game/Set/Match.
First initial Lastname at yahoo.com. Haven't actually used the account for outgoing e-mail in many years, if ever, but its still mine. I get e-mails for some lady who is apparently an extreme liberal, an avid shopper who signs up for department store newsletters and also a Verizon customer (as am I, which I found very confusing as those were the first e-mails I got on her behalf. Her bills were about 1/10th of mine. She must have some kind of government subsidized plan). But for some reason, she feels the need to sign up for all these things with my account. She shares the same first initial and last name, but I am not related. Of course, none of the services she signs up for require a two step verification, and are happy to send her private information, shopping history, outstanding orders, phone payment information, etc. out to any old e-mail address she happens to provide.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/03/they_told_you_not_to_reply.html
Looks like he no longer has the domain
I have a few addresses equivalent to me@here.com, not that one but something similar that people use as a default when signing up for things. I do get a lot of junk mail but also get a lot of welcomes to our service emails. People sign up for accounts like photobucket, facebook, twitter etc and use my address. I probably have access to an account on every major service on the internet at my disposal.
Some schmuck is registering your email on a site you are trying to register for even though they dont control the address they registered? Quite simple: Do a password reset, wait for the reset message to land in your inbox, and voila'! You no longer have to worry about somebody who previously registered your email address (that they dont control) as an account at said website.
Lather rinse repeat.
*why yes, I *AM* a fan of BOFH. How could you tell?
I have the same name as a political reporter/commentator (with the exception of one letter) and over the years, I've given up on trying to reply to people and point them the right way.
When I was trying to be helpful, I had some people ignore me (and continue to email me), thank me (and continue to email me) or think that I really was the public figure and I (or my non-existent staff) was trying to throw person off by lying to them abut my real identity (and continue to email me). I've gotten pretty good at ignoring them.
At this point, the only real annoyance is Twitter. Whenever the person is on TV, writes an article/book, or a movie about them is aired, I get a nice little run of DMs. Sigh.
Why are you opening email from an unknown sender that you know is not for you? I thought everyone knew that if you don't know the sender or the subject delete the thing and do not risk opening it. Let me guess, they sent you an excel file or an attachment to and you opened it and right after you opened it you noticed your internet connection suddenly got slow and your hard drive starting churning.
It became such a common problem the govt mad the names longer now, they have to use more characters in their names than they used to.
Because you stupidly chose j.smith@gmail.com thinking it would be totally unique in the whole universe? Duh. Time to own up on the bad decisions and pick something that uniquely identifies YOU. You will never stop getting others email unless you change. The others wont either but at least you can walk away...
Because the choice is between using you real name or something grossly inappropriate. No there can't possibly be a sensible middle ground here.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
You don't "open" e-mails. E-mails are text. You merely view them.
OTOH, if your mail user agent is too stupid and does all kinds of thing with text it receives - like rendering HTML, displaying images from external servers or running Javascript - maybe get a proper mail program, you fucking idiot.
xkcd has this covered as usual:
http://xkcd.com/1279/
I look at the headers and I have never seen an email that was NOT intended for me. That way I can happily ignore all the legal attachments that are used. The fact that the sender did not intend to send this to me is hardly of my concern. Perhaps I do not WANT to receive it, but that is also of no importance.
About not being able to register because some email is already use, I have a simple solution (simple for the /. crowd, perhaps not for everybody)
I have my own domain. I use the format theirdomain@example.com e.g. slashdot.org@example.com for this site. Those are all aliases. That way I can easily notice who has leaked my email.
For one-time email, I use a semi-trowaway email that I change every year. e.g. 2013@example.com that I delete after a while.
When I do a trip, I like to have everything under one roof. e.g. Italy2013@example.com for my trip last year to Northern Italy.
Not only do I know who spams me, but it is very easy to filter and maintain (for a tech person). I am sure that you can get this for around 10USD per year if not cheaper.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The catchall can be it's own account instead of filling somebody's inbox. Every decent mail client now lets you pick stuff up from multiple sources. Also every decent mail server lets you get the real email out of the way first before running the catch all.
In the hope you're more likely to click (especially when you do not know the sender), they write names, which are almost your's in the To-Header. You're finanicial information may be pennystock spam.
Just saying..
Really, gmail users have no reasonable expectation of privacy.
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To make matters worse, I frequently find I can't use my email to create a new account at various sites because it's already been registered.
Have you considered using the "forgot my password" functionality? You could just take control of the account.
One fellow did this to me three times in the same week. The first two times I merely changed the password and deactivated the account with a quickness. When it happened a third time, I figured I'd teach him a lesson. I let him add all his high-school friends, family and co-workers at the ice-cream parlor over the next week or two, then changed the password, Goatse'd his profile, and sent notices out to all of them. "If little Johnny Junior would like a Facebook account, tell him to get his own. This one is attached to my email address.". I let it sink in for a couple days before putting the kibosh on it.
Johnny's dad was amused and sent me an apology. It seems that Johnny Senior had signed up for a super-spammy dating site with my email address some years ago and I'd Goatse'd his profile in response.
.sig: Now legally binding!
A personalised e-mail address which is both webmail and pop3 mail costs less than a cheap PC program. For example you can purchase a personalised e-mail address with a domain name for less than the price of a yearly subscription to a virus signature scanner. Gmail is not the way to do business it's not private you only have basic controls and it is unprofessional. Even somebody on welfare could purchase a personalised e-mail address for one year for less than the price of a yearly subscription to an antivirus product. Gmail Google mail is meant for children on social networks and for people who don't really need an e-mail address. For goodness sake let the computer illiterate use Google Gmail, if you try to use something like that for business you would be taken for a poor cheap miser somebody that should not be taken seriously. If You were in the land of the rip-off the U.K. and you picked the most expensive personalised domain e-mail address the total price for a year would be 50 pounds sterling With 50 pop3/IMAP mailboxes. Unlimited bandwidth. Spam filters with block IP's and webmail with full control panel and it would still be cheaper than a yearly subscription to an antivirus product. Leave Gmail with the social network children and the down-and-outs.
I had a similar issue with my provider email account. A guy with nearly an identical name using his email address for bussiness.
My email happened to be a verry comon typo for his address.
So far I had receieved porn, threats, priceropositions.
I created a mailgroup, with all addresses found including his address and forwaded the bulshit blindly.
Threats, porn, price offers, anything..
It finished soon :)
Btw: previously I've mailed the guy to choose another. My address predates his almost 2 years and he was running a bussiness.
In the past, my ISP e-mail address has been given to travel sites, car dealerships, etc by someone else, for some reason. I tried contacting the company where the account was created, but I think this is a use case that no one ever actually thought about before, and as a result there is no way to fix the problem. Either that or no one cares. I sure never got any response at all.
Use case: Customer gives wrong e-mail address to us. The person with this e-mail address notifies us. Then ... ???
I really don't think this ever occurred to anyone who has ever created an e-mail system.
Yahoo in the last 6 months allowed you to create a list of alias accounts that you would like if they were available, first come first serve. I got my fInitial.lname@yahoo.com. I haven't sent anything from it yet but get all kinds of emails that people apparently use as throwaways. The worst I have done is cancelled some woman's Bridal Appointment. My advice, don't be lazy and use an account that you think isn't active.
My address (which you can see unobfuscated right in this comment's metadata!), or most account names, if they have a six-or-more character minimum, is in the form of segin. Except in the case in which I have to create a new account in the same year (due to technical issues with the account, or I botched some WORM metadata, like date-of-birth), then I use _whatever as the prefix.
I could care less if it looks professional or not (or being spied on, if someone spies on my accounts, I feel sorry for them.) The only email address I have that the account name is based on my real name is a mere redirect to my Gmail account.
I've always used multiple accounts for different purposes, and none of them are my actual name.
All emails are the minimum 6 letters @ domain : abcdef@whatever.com
I rarely get a lot of spam because the spam filters seem to work well, and the short address seems to be mostly invisible to the spammers.
On the rare occasions that I got something belonging to someone else, it was usually a mis-type and I sent a reply to the sender.
This was a bit of a challenge when I got rent receipts from a Brazilian Real Estate agent, but with a little help from Google translate I worked it out.
Don't blame me, it's usually 2 in the morning when I post
I have the exact same problem. I kept receiving divorce papers from a clueless attorney who just started using email. He was so proud of himself, sending to the wrong address! I sent him THREE emails telling him he had the WRONG address, and the private legal docs just kept coming. Apparently email is just for sending, not for reading. Finally I emailed the cc'd folks, telling them how sorry I was that they were getting divorced, that it's the children who suffer most, and would they please tell their attorney to stop sending me their legal docs? They were really angry at me of course, because they thought I somehow did this on purpose. A couple more rounds of this (lawyer forwarding incorrectly, me cc'ing everyone and commenting with my own opinion) and I presume the lawyer either fixed his problem or they got another attorney, because the messages finally stopped. A couple of months ago I received a lovely form from the ATF (IIRC) about an internship I'd apparently been approved for on the opposite side the country. They needed the forms for the higher level background check. I'm sure my initial namesake would have been upset if I'd filled out the forms with "fun facts". Instead I did the right thing and let the ATF know they had the wrong email address. I guess I'm not haxor material.
Got squatters in your basement? Just buy a new house and move on!
Why should I vacate my email address just because somebody occasionally mistakes it as their own? It doesn't do them any good, because they don't have the password to it (it's my account, after all). And presumably any other address I choose is also going to have the same problem, so I haven't made anything better by switching.
Your suggestion is dumb. You are a dumb person.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Glad to finally see I'm not the ONLY person that has this issue with Gmail. Never get such emails in my Yahoo Plus account. A while back I was getting emails for some guy referring to issues with his Verizon Fios account. Currently, getting lots of emails for some guy that shares my first name from eBay, telling him he's not allowed to sell live animals... he's apparently trying to sell a parrot for $1000. I've NEVER had an eBay account myself. Never done any business with Verizon either.
"A Bird In The Hand Will Poop On Your Wrist"-Benny Hill,1982
Here at .@gmail.com, the dating site account (by a geographically close younger man) is only a minor recent addition.
The crown jewels of my collection of misdirected email are a number of business discussions about curiously complicated and slightly shady securities trading; banking jargon, angry ultimatums, U.S. Silver Certificates and interesting intermediaries can be quite fun as a mere spectator.
I have issues with retirement plan payments, an order for over 800 € of screws, invoices, a resume, a shopping list, selfies, a couple of stubborn LinkedIn and Facebook inviters, season greetings and chain letters. Aggregating the mistakes at other free email accounts I'm a professor of English literature (but maybe also of other subjects), a rugby player, living in Florence and Milan but possibly born in Venezuela, a local administrator, a motorcycle driver, and above all a close friend of several veritable freaks, including people insisting that *I* don't recognize *them*.
Thanks to Google's enlightened platform integration, even after shutting up by email some of these people show up as contact suggestions on Google+, guilty only of having a Gmail account.
I've got a common enough name that hits one of my Gmail accounts. I reply ALL back, and tell them I'm not the person that they are looking for. Although for some issues, this doesn't work. Juniper Card Services. I've emailed, I've talked to them on the phone, I've marked them as spam. I was able to figure out one guy's real email (he was looking for a new car) who lived in Hong Kong. Another guy in West Virginia was sending me stuff about used cars, and the sender was pissed that I wasn't responding. I told him where I lived, NOT in WV, and that his emails were going to the wrong place. Frat brothers have sent me crap. I've gotten a ton of personal emails.
Luckily for me, I don't use this email address as my regular address. But if I did, I would be doing password resets just to lock those jokers out of their accounts.
And I have deja vu, didn't we discuss this previously on /.?
Bryan
I suffer this problem too. "What a wonderful baby shower on Grandpa REMOVED's 93rd birthday for REMOVED the expected daughter of REMOVED and REMOVED Ivey. REMOVED please share with REMOVED and REMOVED. Thanks to everybody for making it such a special day. You have been sent 21 pictures." What follows is 21 pictures of a stereotypical middle class, middle American family. I reply politely with: "Hello all, I realise this email is going to sound a little weird but please bear with me. I am not the Paul Skinner you're after. Unfortunately the Paul Skinner you all know keeps mistakenly thinking that the email address supplied here is his. Unfortunately it's not and it belongs to me, a Paul Skinner from London, UK. If one of you would be kind enough to explain this to him and get him to email me so that i can further explain the situation to him that would be greatly appreciated. So to conclude: email addresses that AREN'T his: *list of not his emails*" To my amazement, I received the following: "Hello all, I, too, received this e-mail in error. I'm the owner of the DOMAIN REMOVED.com address and I received this message addressed to REMOVED. Please remove REMOVED from your address books (as well as any other REMOVED addresses you may have) and check with your desired REMOVED for his current e-mail address. Thanks, A different REMOVED"
What is the problem with rendering HTML? If it is supposed to serve as a functional digital analogue of paper mail, then HTML rendering is a Good Thing. I can bold crap by actually making the lines thicker with my pen. I can underline by drawing an actual underline. I can make the text oblique by writing it slanted. I can do different font sizes by changing the size of the text I write. Images can be included with Scotch tape or glue. Coloring? Use a different color pen (or a different clicker on a multi-color pen.) There's really nothing to be gained by not supporting HTML - I've heard the arguments against, and they don't stand to scrutiny.
Aside from "running JavaScript", there's no real problem there - I've seen all the arguments against, time and time again, since at least 2001. Advertisement? You can avoid that by merely reading the subject line, and examining the sender (both of which are in the headers.) If you receive legitimate email which has subject lines or senders that cannot be distinguished from spam, then consider bitching at your legitimate senders, or replacing them.
sudo make me a sandwich
So anything not my real name is grossly inappropriate? So, e.g. I should not use segin@somerandomdomain.net?
I'm 23 and I do NOT use my real name as my email address. My netwide handle is "segin", and quite easily (by third graders likely!) resolved to my real name if you're not a total lasy twat.
If I email you from segin@anything.any, and you find that it's not kgill2@someshit.wat to be offensive, dude, seriously, bugger off.
Very few people I know across the age spectrum use their real name for their email account name, the two that do had their account names assigned to them by their ISP fifteen years ago.
sudo make me a sandwich
As my signature says: make it yourself
alias sudo="echo make it yourself #" ; # https://pipedot.org/~stderr & http://soylentnews.org/~stderr
I have had this happen a few times, and I always reply with a note that they are sending this to an unintended user. Once, it was someone's tax information. Usually if it is important communication, one reply will cause them to correct it in their address book. Mail coming via listserv is more difficult to get changed, so you can set an email rule that will auto delete the message based on the sender (ie, @listserv.church.org) For creating web accounts, you can make an email that you don't really use for other communication (ie, myfacebookemail2468@gmail.com) so it is less likely you will run into others using that email, and it will cut down on spam you get when that website sells your email. I think it is always important to have at least one email from a free account, like gmail, because you may change jobs and lose that account, or you may graduate from that school and lose that account, or change ISP's and lose that account. But try to make a username that is descriptive and easily remembered coachbob@gmail.com is better than B.L.Smith@gmail.com
Firing squad
when people send email to me, I reply saying I am not Hildegard, and that they have the wrong recipient. When people register accounts using my email, I use the "forgot password" facility to get a new password sent to me, and then so whatever I can to delete/close the account, and remove all traces of my address from their systems.
I personally have a post office box (snail mail), I have had it since the boxes were installed at the post office so nobody has ever had the address.
I still get the odd letter addressed to a different name but my box number. Once was a cheque as a Christmas present.
A friend years ago got a service with an ISP, when she gave the name she wanted the operator said "oh i think that name is taken" and then looked it up and it wasn't. She got the service and email lastname@isp (her last name is common).
She then started getting all these weird emails, at first I investigated and thought it was spam. Turned out the name was used previously and they had subscribed to many services. They closed their ISP service and when she got it, it was like nothing had ever hapend.
I just frequently request early checkouts from hotels and deny rsvp requests to various family gatherings.
It appears nobody has considered this marvellously simple approach:
Hit "reply". Type four words: "This is not me." Hit send.
This extends the courtesy to the misdirector of the email of letting them know that they've got bad info.
www.wavefront-av.com
I have this happen about 2x/month. I give a serious sounding but humorous reply - like to the attorney in the UK that was recommending we accept a takeover offer (true!).
As good as this sounds, I think it is about half of what we should accept. Since I know as an attorney you get a percentage I'm sure you would agree to a bigger number. In fact, instead of the (hunrdeds of thousands of pounds) let's go for a million. In fact lets go for a gazillion! I'd really like to be a gazillionaire, it would look good on my resume.
Can you do that for me?
If not, you're fired! Unless of course your email was really meant for someone else, in which case please continue working with them and double check before hitting send.
But just in case, keep my email address in case you do get that gazzillion.
--
That got his attention, a polite and also funny response, and that was the end of it.
Now the Facebook account that was set up Friday is another story. I just posted to the timeline - if you know me, please tell me that I screwed up when setting up this account and send me a PM with the right email address and I'll get it fixed. Then I accepted all of the friend requests. Still no response, I'm debating about getting funny here or just deleting the account. Depends on my time and my mood I guess.
There was a bug in the first year of gmail that would allow a second account created w/a dot.
As a nerd you should have your own domain and an email account using said domain.