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?"

Comments

Get a real mail account

[Animats]

Get a real mail account and get off Gmail/Hotmail/other free service. You get what you pay for.

Re: Get a real mail account

[MarioMax]

This. Domains are cheap, and hosting/forwarding is cheap. Plus you get some level of personalization.

Also easier to remember. bobsmith@bobsmith.com is catchy while bobsmith@gmail.com is generic and easily forgotten.

Re:Get a real mail account

[bondsbw]

Obvious privacy issues aside, what is your experience with paid services? I've only used free accounts on Gmail and Hotmail (other than employer accounts and ISP accounts when I was on dialup).

And specifically how do they alleviate the problems described in the post?

Re: Get a real mail account

[Nerdfest]

Exactly. This also covers the case where your ISP or Microsoft or Google does something that you can't abide by. It decouples you from your provider. You can move to a different email hosting service or even run your own without much inconvenience. It also looks a little more professional than having a HotMail account.

Re:Get a real mail account

[Anonymous Coward]

FWIW, you can't (any longer) use GMail with a custom domain for free. Free Google Apps was withdrawn for new signups last year and the for-pay version is fairly expensive.

Re: Get a real mail account

[MarioMax]

I've used my own domain for 9 years with paid hosting thru a major host. Personally I can't stand webmail and stick to traditional POP3 email and for that purpose it suits me. But it is easy enough to set up domain forwarding to services like gmail if you choose (most likely for a fee).

The nice thing about buying a domain is you can pretty much set up unlimited email addresses under the domain for any purpose you choose, or use a single email address as a "catch-all" for said domain. Web services like Facebook won't know and won't care.

As for specific hosting recommendations, they are all about the same in terms of terrible service and support, but I encourage you to research and decide for yourself.

Re:Get a real mail account

[Anonymous Coward]

FWIW, you can't (any longer) use GMail with a custom domain for free.

Ho ho ho. My registrar gives me free email forwarding. I have my own domain, it goes to Gmail (currently). Google don't know the difference.

Re:Get a real mail account

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, that's not a real solution. Not when you've had gmail since it's inception.

What I'd do is...

Where anytime the email has already been registered, reset it and take ownership of it.
Mark any email sent to you that you don't want as spam. Even if you save it. In theory Gmail will start marking all emails sent from those email addresses as spam or contact the domain of the sender.

If it's your email, who gives a crap. A classic dox'ing of annoying, obnoxious and stupid people is what 4chan does. If you feel that the emails you are receiving contain sensitive info, maybe start posting best stuff on pastebin if you're feeling malicious. Otherwise just ignore it with the spam filtering.

Re: Get a real mail account

[sparty]

That doesn't always solve it. My personal address is on my personal domain, which is my name (dot com). My name is not particularly common, but not terribly uncommon, either, and on several occasions I've gotten misdirected email because someone got the domain wrong. My personal favorite was the Verizon FIOS signup info, because clearly the person who signed up screwed up his *own* email address.

I've given up on dealing with them, I just hit the GMail archive button.

(and yes, I could reduce the volume by turning off the catchall inbox feature, but I prefer to leave it on so that I can sign up for websites with unique email addresses and then know which jackasses sold (or lost) my info to a spammer down the road.)

Re:Get a real mail account

[pspahn]

1. Settings button (top right of Gmail)

2. Accounts and Import

3. Add POP3 Account

4. Read email.

Re:Get a real mail account

[Tool Man]

Bah. This cranky old guy (with a *four* digit ID) agrees with Animats. Get your own domain, and control your own online presence, with as much or little mucking about as you like.

Re:Get a real mail account

[Anonymous Coward]

>You are the cattle, being sold off to the highest bidder for slaughter.

Well, at least slashdot isn't prone to hyperbole.

Re: Get a real mail account

[similar_name]

and yes, I could reduce the volume by turning off the catchall inbox feature

I use the catchall feature with a second email account. I just check it when I need/want to.

Re: Get a real mail account

[jklovanc]

Except that another Bob Smith has already registered that domain. What do you choose them? If the email address is common enough to cause collisions so is the domain name.

Re: Get a real mail account

[PlusFiveTroll]

Never use a catchall. And I repeat, never use a catchall. It's better to use a hosting service that allows you to control alias accounts easily and quickly. If someone types a non-existent address they are suppose to get a bounce email.

Catchalls also create some unique bad situations. A number of years ago I had a small client who had a domain similar to a large university. They had just a few accounts on the domain and in general received around 20 emails a day and ran a catchall to get mistyped addresses. When they came in to the office and had over 35,000 emails in the inbox we new something was wrong. A spammer was 'confused', or something and thought the domain was part of the university and was sending mail from a@domain to zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz@domain and every possibly name and combination in between. It was coming from thousands of different IP addresses and hundreds of connections per minute.

We had to turn off catchall and implement a SMTP policy of instant disconnect in the RCPT TO: header to stop the flood. After around a week the barrage stopped.

Re:Get a real mail account

[TheRaven64]

Nah, that's not a real solution. Not when you've had gmail since it's inception.

And the longer you keep using it, the harder it is to switch. I don't personally know anyone who has lost their GMail account, but I do for other mail providers (and Facebook), either because the provider decided they had violated some nebulous terms of service, they decided to start charging and kept pushing the price up, or they went out of business. If you like the GMail interface, then get the Google Apps for your Domain thing, buy a domain and point the DNS at Google, and at least then you can always point it somewhere else if you and Google stop wanting to do business.

Re: Get a real mail account

[snsh]

My personal domain name is a variation in the spelling of the name of a multinational company. I get a lot of people's bank statements, hotel reservations, etc. which I suppose come from senders who key in email addresses read to them over the phone, and are prone to typing in the wrong spelling.

The volume of the email has gone way down over time since self-service has become more common. It's not as big a problem as it used to be.

The best part of it, though, is when I get CV/resumes from random job applicants trying to email the company. There's unlimited prank potential when you're dealing with someone who thinks you might offer them a real job.

Re: Get a real mail account

[mwvdlee]

I use my own domain and domain email as well. It's all stored on my own server, but generally I use Gmail as a mail client.

However, the unique-email-address thing is something gmail is actually quite useful for. user+whatever@gmail.com and user+anything@gmail.com will both be delivered to user@gmail.com.

Re: Get a real mail account

[DarwinSurvivor]

Depending on the software you are using for receiving your email, you may be able to do a partial catch-all. For instance, have it accept any emails sent to "spamcatch.xxxxxx@yourdomain.com", then just change the xxxxx part. This still lets you track which company gave away your email and also reduces the chances of getting someone else's mail by accident.

Of course the best solution is to make a script or something that lets you quickly generate one-off accounts, but the above may be enticing if you insist of doing it the lazy way.

Re: Get a real mail account

[93 Escort Wagon]

Exactly. This also covers the case where your ISP or Microsoft or Google does something that you can't abide by. It decouples you from your provider. You can move to a different email hosting service or even run your own without much inconvenience. It also looks a little more professional than having a HotMail account.

You don't need to run your own mail server to decouple your email address from your current email provider - even if you want to use gmail. In my case, I've used my alumni email address as my constant email address for many, many years, even though I've changed the back end provider multiple times and am currently on gmail.

People don't generally send email to my gmail address, and when I send mail it doesn't show as coming from my gmail address.

Re: Get a real mail account

[Hognoxious]

a partial catch-all.

That makes no sense at all. All is all or nothing, just like nothing is.

You mean a catch some.

Re: Get a real mail account

[Hognoxious]

Domain is not a verb.

Re: Get a real mail account

[Anonymous Coward]

Backscatter only counts if you send bounces after the email is fully received. If you reject the email between SMTP HELO or EHLO and DATA, you're good.

Re: Get a real mail account

[Anonymous Coward]

PlusFiveTroll does the correct thing.
By disconnecting after RCPT TO you won't be producing backscatter. But legitimate users will get a nice bounce, because their own ISP will send it to them.
If you really don't want someone to find your mail address, then you can use a black hole. Because SMTP clients could (and do sometimes) use the disconnect as a way to gather that information.

Re: Get a real mail account

[egcagrac0]

I use my own domain and domain email as well. It's all stored on my own server, but generally I use Gmail as a mail client.

Offtopic: it's also stored on their servers. Some people would say this fully negates the advantages of storing it on your own server.

Re: Get a real mail account

[egcagrac0]

All nouns can be verbed.

Example: all nouns can be verbed.

Re:Get a real mail account

[egcagrac0]

Slashdot has never been prone to hyperbole.

Re: Get a real mail account

[djyrn3715]

Follow this advice, but don't expect that the same thing won't happen.

Re: Get a real mail account

[beelsebob]

You can do that with gmail too. your.name+anything@gmail.com gets redirected to your.name@gmail.com.

Re: Get a real mail account

[aaaaaaargh!]

Why would anyone use GMail for handling the mail of his/her own domain? Ever heard of an email client? And regarding the original question, what's the problem? Why don't you just delete the mail? Do you get something like 400 mails per day meant for another person that you cannot filter out?

Re: Get a real mail account

[Hognoxious]

Only verbable nouns can be verbed, just like only adjectivable nouns can be adjectivised. What's more, according to your link, the correct form would be "domainified", "gedomainiert" or somesuch.

Re: Get a real mail account

[Culture20]

And for sites that disallow plus signs in email fields, y..o.ur...nam....e@gmail.com resolves to yourname@gmail.com too. A little bookkeeping, and you can keep track just as with the +. Of course the companies can sanitize the dots or pluses when they buy or sell, thus the utility of your own mail server.

Re:Get a real mail account

[FatLittleMonkey]

The problem is that while gmail might look to you like it is providing "email service" to you, [...] You are gmail's product, not gmail's customer.

Sure, but at least they actually provide a service.

What do I get from the NSA? I can't even get a copy of my own phone records, let alone in an easily searchable format. #bunchajerks

Re:Get a real mail account

[FatLittleMonkey]

I don't personally know anyone who has lost their GMail account,

I have. It also locked up every google-owned service, such as blogger/blogspot, (and presumably any 3rd party site that uses a google-account for login.)

Sent in the official challenge-form via another email account, next day the block was lifted. Still have no idea what I was actually meant to have done. The only thing I can think of was logging in from someone else's computer (I was at their place when I was blocked) which is surely the whole fucking point of having webmail.

Re: Get a real mail account

[SQLGuru]

I don't bother setting up on-off e-mails. I just set up a catch all for spam. Then I have non-catch all e-mails for my real accounts. So slashdot@mydomain.com goes to catch-all, but I can still identify who sells my e-mail.

Re:Get a real mail account

[fast turtle]

this was exactly how I took a spam account away from a fucking spammer though I think it may have been facebook using reverse psycology on me. Got tired of all the spam about posts to my effen wall so I recovered the damn pw and changes settings. Now I get nothing from them in my gmail account as I don't care for facebook

Re: Get a real mail account

[Anonymous Coward]

This. Domains are cheap, and hosting/forwarding is cheap. Plus you get some level of personalization.

Domains don't solve the problem. I've had $mydomain.com since about 1994. It's not a common word, but there does happen to be a business in another country with a similar name: $mydomain.com.co. I often get mis-directed mail (internal company matters, meeting requests, client communication, financial matters, etc). Depending on the content, how busy I am, and the phase of the moon, I'll forward the mail to the intended recipient, with an added paragraph explaining the problem.

There is no general solution to this issue -- except to take off and nuke them from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.

Re: Get a real mail account

[DarwinSurvivor]

Of course, but most people wouldn't intrisically know what a catch-some is. catch-all has become a term of its own.

Re: Get a real mail account

[Dan541]

It decouples you from your provider. You can move to a different email hosting service or even run your own without much inconvenience.

This alone is an important reason to use your own domain. You can forever be in control of your own email address meaning you can have the address for life.

Re: Get a real mail account

[Dan541]

I have found that an effective solution for catchall is to run it on a subdomain. So I have.

user@domain.tld for my email address and wildcard@catchall.domain.tld for anytime I need to supply a unique email address.

Re: Get a real mail account

[gwolf]

I defend that same point, and of course, my mail address is gwolf@gwolf.org (hey, no point in hiding it, have had it for too long for spambots not to notice!). People's perception is *not* IMO what you say: When I repeat my name after the '@', the most common answer is, "come again?". Some people have even tried to correct me explaining my name can *not* be part of the domain.

Of course, I'm better off not receiving mails from those people...

Re: Get a real mail account

[CaptQuark]

So, isn't it obvious this is the problem he is running into? If his email address is F.M.Last(at)gmail, he will receive FMLast, F.MLast, FM.Last, FML.ast, etc.

I'm a little surprised Gmail will allow a new email account that has dotted username if they already have a user that receives all related dotted username variations.

~~

Re: Get a real mail account

[Great Big Bird]

I just started using microsoft's domain stuff on mine. Rather handy.

Re: Get a real mail account

[mjwx]

This. Domains are cheap, and hosting/forwarding is cheap. Plus you get some level of personalization.

Also easier to remember. bobsmith@bobsmith.com is catchy while bobsmith@gmail.com is generic and easily forgotten.

The problem is, cheap hosting is crap.

I have several domains but still use Gmail as my primary email because it's a hell of a lot more functional than the email provided by the hosting company (which has a limit of about 250 MB per mailbox). I've got a gig and a half in my Gmail account, indexed and easily searchable. If I need to find an invoice from 2-3 years ago, I can find it using the product I purchased (or even just the brand sometimes).

I used to get some misdirected email (was meant for some saffa bird) as my email address was NotMyEmail@gmail.com and her address was NotMyEmail2@gmail.com but this has seriously tapered off since she realised she wasn't getting her mail. I just ignored it as 1) it might be a phishing trap and 2) if it was legit, it's her own damn fault for giving them the wrong email address.

So OP, just ignore them and set up a rule to bin them as they come in. Simples.

My only real problem with getting signed up for things I didn't want (sometimes its hard to tell if it's proper spam or just someone fat fingering their email address). Unsubscribes normally work, otherwise its a rule to bin it, I've had was someone signing me up for corn growing tips from a US midwestern university which seem to be sent via SMS so no unsubscribe link. But I've set up rules to bin these as soon as I get them (another thing my hosting provider doesn't offer, server side rules). However using my own domain is no real defence against this.

If I ran a business, I'd pay for a proper commercial service (and these get expensive fast, sure only $5 for a mailbox but they get you on spam filtering, backups, maintenance, SLA, and all the other "options" that you end up needing down the track) but I dont and Gmail is a hell of a lot better than any cheap hosting service I've used. I haven't seen any that could get away from POP3/SMTP which makes the damned thing near unusable.

Re: Get a real mail account

[foofish]

They don't. If you register a username, you also get all dotted variations of that user name.

Re:Get a real mail account

[Z00L00K]

If you for some reason need to have an email account at gmail (it's useful in some cases as a secondary) then use a name that's unique and still easy for you to remember.

Re:Get a real mail account

[Gonoff]

And will never bee in a million years.

Re: Get a real mail account

[aminorex]

and that's a good thing. we need to render presecriptive grammar obsolete. this can only be done incrementally, by habituating our correspondents to ideographic style

Re: Get a real mail account

[Lumpy]

Running a email server is NOT cheap. so still use gmail but with your own domain. Low cost and you get the absolute best spam filtering on the planet.

Re: Get a real mail account

[segin]

This alone is an important reason to use your own domain. You can forever be in control of your own email address meaning you can have the address for life or as long as your financial, legal, and/or mental and/or physical health allow.

FTFY.

Re: Get a real mail account

[kmoser]

Until the RIAA accuses you of piracy and the Feds seize your domain.

Re: Get a real mail account

[kmoser]

Uh...GMail *is* a client.

Re: Get a real mail account

[swalve]

Prescriptive grammar is what makes a language. Otherwise, they are just random words.

Re: Get a real mail account

[StenD]

I have a similar issue with my personal domain, as an unfortunate number of in-duh-viduals in Utah seem to be unable to correctly transcribe the letters S F C N (for Spanish Fork Community Network), and instead enter S T E N. As a result, I receive email from educational, financial, government, medical, religious and retail organizations intended for specific Utah residents. In many cases, the senders are uninterested in the fact that the email is not reaching the intended recipient.

Personally, I report most of the messages as spam - they are unsolicited by the actual recipient (me), and if the sender cannot be bothered to confirm if the messages are being sent to the intended recipient, they deserve whatever trouble they have with their service provider.

Turning off the catchall feature is not an option, as I create far too many unique email addresses to set up on the server. Also, I do not use my own account name or the company name in the email addresses - once the address has been compromised and sold, the end recipient will have very little information as to what the address was used for. What I would like to do is find a provider who will do wildcard hosting, so I can use a catchall for *@*.STEN, blackhole any of the those hosts which are found by spammers, and severely limit the legitimate addresses @STEN.

Re: Get a real mail account

[nine-times]

Of course, all the Bob Smiths in the world can't get their own "bobsmith.com" domain, so if people try to follow your advice, we'll end up with a million variations of "bobfsmith.com" and "bob-smith.com" and "bobsmith.org", which means it will be easy to get mixed up. Plus, everyone knows what gmail is. If I tell you my email address is "bobsmith@gmail.com", are you really going to have a particularly hard time remembering that?

Re: Get a real mail account

[afgun]

This alone is an important reason to use your own domain. You can forever be in control of your own email address meaning you can have the address for life.

Unless you get divorced. ;-)

Re: Get a real mail account

[nine-times]

I think you're misunderstanding the discussion. If I send an email to a non-existent email on your domain, your email might accept the email transmission and then send a bounce in return, which will notify me, the sender, that the message didn't go through. However, this setup will unfortunately produce backscatter-- i.e. in cases where spammers are spoofing real email addresses, the owner of the spoofed email address will receive non-delivery reports for emails they didn't send. If, on the other hand, your domain has a catch-all account, then your server will accept the message fully, and not send a non-delivery report. This eliminates backscatter, but now I, a legitimate sender, will not receive a notification that their emails didn't go through.

However, if you reject the email during the SMTP transmission, then my mail server, being legitimate, will notify me that the message was not transmitted. However, your mail server will not actively be sending non-delivery reports, so there will be no backscatter. The only downside to this configuration is that it creates a potential for directory harvesting-- i.e. spammers can attempt to email every permutation of email addresses and take note of the email addresses that do not cause the connection to be terminated, thereby determining which email addresses on your domain are valid.

Re: Get a real mail account

[n3r0.m4dski11z]

"Never use a catchall."

Your "bad situations" are easily controlled automatically with spam filters such as spamassassin. The positives of giving every website a unique email, so you can easily see when a website has had their shit hacked, far outways any backscatter problems. You can also tweak the delays on your mailserver which breaks or slows down many common spamming tools.

Another benefit is that i can easily block some company from ever emailing me again but blocking their company specific email addres I have created.

Re: Get a real mail account

[michelcolman]

Don't your e-mails get caught in spam filters then? Some people seem to have really paranoid e-mail services that consider mail as spam if the "from" address does not match the smtp server or for similar reasons.

Re: Get a real mail account

[Reziac]

Also works on Earthlink.

Does not work with domains using 1&1.com/perfora.net as the mail host.

Re: Get a real mail account

[PlusFiveTroll]

>Your "bad situations" are easily controlled automatically with spam filters such as spamassassin.

Yes, but spamassassin is very heavy on a server if you are receiving far more email then normal, as was the case I listed. If you do not have lots of extra computing power, or you are paying per compute unit used dropping non-existent names 'significantly' reduces server load. My general setups do something like RBL > Address check > Content check.

Re: Get a real mail account

[Hognoxious]

I can noun any verb I want. For example, adjectivise.

That's verbing an adjective. You've reversalized what you intentioned.

Re: Get a real mail account

[segin]

And the alimony payments impede your ability to pay your registar, hosting provider, expensive business-class line so your ISP gives you an IP outside of Spamhaus's greylisted dynamic ranges, etc.

Re: Get a real mail account

[Kalriath]

Exception is Google Apps, which considers f.m.last to be different from fm.last.

Re: Get a real mail account

[Kalriath]

The best part of it, though, is when I get CV/resumes from random job applicants trying to email the company. There's unlimited prank potential when you're dealing with someone who thinks you might offer them a real job.

Until you actually try it, at which point that multinational files a UDRP against you for using the domain in bad faith, and the domain is handed over to them with damages awarded against you.

Re:Get a real mail account

[csdarknightcs]

The problem is not with the Gmail account, it is with his common username. What is a "real" mail account anyway?

Re: Get a real mail account

[csdarknightcs]

The problem he is having is with them putting his email address instead of the intended user, which makes me think they got the @gmail part right, and the username wrong. If they cannot remember bobsmith@gmail.com why would they remember bobsmith@bobsmith.com? Since many use gmail.com with their own email, gmail.com would come to them naturally, but the first.middle.last is what they are messing up. I would suggest using something descriptive rather than a common given name, that is less likely to be duplicated (for websites) or mistyped (for emails). coachbob@gmail.com vs bob.q.smith@gmail.com for example, but using something that helps someone envision you when they try to think of your email.

Re:Get a real mail account

[JamieIanMacgregor]

I haven't been slaughtered... not even once... I receive some tailored ads but I feel that is a fair price to pay for an email service. I don't even get spam with this one like I did back in the hotmail days.

Re: Get a real mail account

[93 Escort Wagon]

I haven't run into this issue, but I would guess that a mail client that doesn't properly set the "Sender:" header might.

Re: Get a real mail account

[demonlapin]

It's English. You can't out-weird English. As James Nicoll said,

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

Re: Get a real mail account

[snsh]

Nope. For a UDRP to go anywhere, you need to meet a pretty high bar, as in you actually registered a domain with the intent to confuse the public, and have no legitimate claim to it otherwise. And since when does ICANN award damages?

But more to the point, you're basically saying that the recipient of a misdirected email (like the OP) is required to delete it. That's not the law.

Re:Get a real mail account

[Gryle]

Mind pointing us non-network-savy folks in the direction of a few good tutorials on the subject?

Re: Get a real mail account

[Kalriath]

Yup. It would definitely be a bad faith registration to impersonate someone else after registering a typographic variation of their name. It is certain that you would lose a UDRP under those cases. Plus, the owner of the correctly spelled domain, or the applicant you fooled, could just plain sue you in a court of law. So, there's that.

Also, it's clear you don't actually know how UDRP works, since you tried to claim two things. One; that only the law applies (it doesn't, the registrant agreement adds additional conditions on your domain usage) and two; that ICANN is in any way involved (it isn't, UDRP cases are progressed through WIPO, which is a part of the WTO).

Re: Get a real mail account

[snsh]

Except there is no "correctly spelled domain". You're saying that the owner of "ashley.com" can stake a claim to owning "ashlee.com" or "ashleigh.com". You also presume (incorrectly) that the multinational registered their domain first. Pay attention to context. This thread is about personal names as part of domain names where there's a lot of variation, not about fanciful marks which enjoy stronger trademark protection.

Re: Get a real mail account

[Kalriath]

No, but they can stake a claim to it as part of their business. So long as you are not pretending to be them, then there is no problem. The instant you decide to impersonate them specifically using your registration, that is when your usage of the domain becomes bad faith.

Also, it makes you a douche if you do it. So, there's that going for you.

Re: Get a real mail account

[squiggleslash]

Or Hitler rises from the dead and hacks your server.

WTF?

The only plausible solution...

[XPeter]

Is to change your name

Re:The only plausible solution...

[bhcompy]

I guess I don't know how lucky I am to be one of two people in the US with my first initial and my last name. The other being my brother. I guess it's nice having a family name only a few dozen people have

Re:The only plausible solution...

[pspahn]

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.

Re:The only plausible solution...

[Anonymous Coward]

Change it to Albert Qaeda , or Al for short.
Then all that NSA snooping will pay off as everyone who emails you will get sent on holiday to Guantanamo.

Re:The only plausible solution...

[Anonymous Coward]

For years I have periodically received email intended for someone else, seemingly with the same name. At first I just deleted them. After they continued to come in, despite never receiving a reply from my address, I just made a filter to automatically reroute them to trash. Problem solved.

The more annoying problem was when someone was adding events to the Google Calendar attached to my email address and I was receiving notifications for them. I never even signed up with the Calendar service, so I am not sure how that happened. After contacting the person (who is from another country) adding the events yet still getting them, I started adding tons of fake events to their calendar until they eventually got the message.

Re:The only plausible solution...

[Gonoff]

Add something more to your name. Like "j.smith1997@nowhere.nul", ...

That doesn't even work for Twitter. I have a simple handle like @something but people keep sending me stuff for @something1979 @something_a and so on.

Fortunately, Twitter is just a glorified XML feed and I just ignore most things about how I had a really good time at a party and "what was that chicks name?"

Well, for your second problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

Reset password, follow emailed link, and the account is now yours. And, bonus if it's already been paid for.

Re:Well, for your second problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

Modded funny? I've done this a few times. It has always been a teenage girl.

After the password reset I sign on, delete content, unfriend friends, change the email address, and close the account if that's an option.

Re:Well, for your second problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

Modded funny? I've done this a few times. It has always been a teenage girl.

After the password reset I sign on, delete content, unfriend friends, change the email address, and close the account if that's an option.

I bet you didn't get many dates in high school.

Re:Well, for your second problem...

[koan]

None of which you can do if it's Facebook, or any other popular site.

Re:Well, for your second problem...

[CBravo]

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?

Re:Well, for your second problem...

[lxs]

It has always been a teenage girl.

Well it's your own fault for choosing numberonebieberfan@gmail.com for an email address.

Re:Well, for your second problem...

[vux984]

To make an analogy, its the same as if they were signing up to magazine subscriptions etc and using your mailing address.

Is there any reason you can think of that suggests you shouldn't be allowed to cancel or modify the subscription if you don't want the magazines.

If they want an account they should sign up for it with their own email address, not mine.

That said I agree with you to the point that oen shouldn't just be malicious and nasty and steal or deface their content etc. But if they registered accounts in your name, with your address, you should absolutely be allowed to cancel them to the extent that you can.

Re:Well, for your second problem...

[sd1248]

I'll also add that the real problem is the number of sites that allow accounts to be created without verifying the email. I find that I get a lot more emails announcing that I am now the owner of an account that I did not create compared to the number of emails asking me to verify my email. And yes facebook is one of those sites. I ended up having to create an empty facebook account linked to my gmail address to stop the cycle of other people signing up with my email and then I have to delete the account to stop the spam.

Re:Well, for your second problem...

[charlesbakerharris]

You would not believe the number of misdirected emails I've gotten at numbereighthundredtwenty@gmail.com.

Re:Well, for your second problem...

[Aristos Mazer]

They already deeded their house over to me -- they assigned it to me by saying this is the e-mail address associated with the account. If you ask "who is the rightful account holder", the answer as far as I can tell is whoever has the e-mail address.

Re:Well, for your second problem...

[tlhIngan]

Reset password, follow emailed link, and the account is now yours. And, bonus if it's already been paid for.

Funny enough, I had it happen to me with British Telecom and apparently some university in Colorado.

But for both of them, I couldn't use the password reset link - each time I tried, it gave me "email address is not recognized" which when I look at the headers, no it's not. No + addressing or anything - I just copied and pasted the email address from the header.

One of the ironies is that BT is sending me personal details about their account - I know they have a moderate DSL link, a couple of phone lines, they are a business, etc., and I was even given their real mailing address! And after all the EU nonsense about privacy! They're just emailing all the details to me in the clear, to a US routed e-mail server! (My domain is hosted in the US).

The Colorado university one I didn't understand - they were sending me all sorts of notices and such, but I certainly couldn't log in or recover password. Oddly, I could unsubscribe just fine.

And my domain isn't the sort that I'd expect people would accidentally enter (being a .net to begin with and while only 4 characters, is still unrelated to any subject I could think of, so it's not like people would accidentally make a typo or something).

And those were two of the more notable ones.

All I know is, apparently a mining engineer and a business in the UK are probably wondering where their email is.

Unfortunately, I can't be bothered to do anything but mark it as spam.

Re:Well, for your second problem...

[Courageous]

Huh? "myfirstname.mylastname@myemailprovider.com" is my account on every computer in the world as far as I am concerned. If someone else fraudently registered it, they can take me to court and see how well the court receives their fraud. Not well, in any non-barbaric country, I am sure.

Re:Well, for your second problem...

[Skreems]

A lot of sites have stopped doing this. They just blindly assume that whatever you typed must be right. Facebook is a prime example.

Re:Well, for your second problem...

[LongearedBat]

delete content, unfriend friends, change the email address, and close the account if that's an option.

That's just plain nasty. It's unlikely they did that on purpose, given how signups work. So many things they can never get back.

Re:Well, for your second problem...

[CBravo]

You can delete a new account. For an existing account: Just can always mail the abuse@ department that something is wrong and you should not receive emails again.

I also have a very generic @gmail.com account and regularly receive the weirdest mails. If they are not spam I try to correct the situation. People make mistakes, up to 15% when writing their email address down (and I know because I work at an ESP).

No problems

[mysidia]

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.

Re:No problems

[It doesn't come easy]

Hmmm. It is actually interesting. Email addresses are unique to the world. No one else can create the same value @ domain unless the domain gets sold to another entity (which has not happened to @gmail.com as far as I know). If you have an email address assigned to you from a reputable source, anyone else who sets up an account with that email is already doing something wrong.

I wonder what the legal implications of this is...

Re:No problems

[CanadianMacFan]

Didn't Yahoo just reissue some email accounts that were "inactive"? Never assume that email addresses will always belong to one person for ever and ever. For that matter never assume that an email address even corresponds with a person. It could be a group or even nobody. Or a person could give it to their friend (not good when the account is based on a persons' name). Yes, in the case originally brought up it is a single person. But it doesn't mean that there is a one to one relationship between people and accounts.

Re:No problems

[CBravo]

Yes. Some ESPs were given lists to unsubscribe contacts. It would be bad to start out with newsletters from someone else.

Re:No problems

[mysidia]

I wonder what the legal implications of this is...

There's not any legal recourse you are going to be able to pursue against them for entering your email address by honest mistake.

They were negligent in making a typographic error, but they do not have a duty of care towards you in that regard. You need evidence of intentional malice.

Re:No problems

[slashdotjunker]

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.

This is bad advice. Do not interact with an unknown account opened with your email address.

A successful login from your IP address may be construed as assuming ownership of the account. They might try to collect money from you. Or, the account may have been used for illegal activities which are now linked to your IP address.

Never assume ownership of an unknown account. All communications (if any) with the account management should clearly state that you are not the account holder and are not responsible for the account. In particular, do not ask for the account to be closed. Asking the company to take action on the account may also be construed as assuming ownership of the account.

At best you can send an email stating you are not the account holder. Then put them on your block list. Do not get more involved than that.

Re:No problems

[mysidia]

Unfortunately, that often doesn't work. Many places require specifying personal details in order to do a password reset. If they need a real name or postal code, or whatever, I'm screwed. Oftentimes you can't even unsubscribe from their fucking spam list without logging in first.

Many might, most do not. It depends on if you think you signed up for the service, or you are just getting annoying emails from the service and want them to stop.

You can expeditiously address the spam list issue by setting a mail filter to discard the sender, or you may write to them to communicate the issue and get support.

Also, contacting their abuse department and/or their ISPs abuse department generally works pretty well.

If you have to login or supply extra information in order to opt-out of regular emails, then their service is in criminal non-compliance with the CAN-SPAM act; a visible and operable unsubscribe option must be included for all e-mails, In addition: name, email, and postal address of the sender must be included, and requests to opt-out, must be honored within no more than 10 days, whether the request is through the unsubscribe option, or by writing to the sender.

Re:Don't make an email account with your name in i

[hawguy]

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.

Abandon Your Real Name

[rueger]

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.

Re:Abandon Your Real Name

[aardvarkjoe]

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.

This is actually a good idea even if you don't have the problem that the original poster had. I created a new gmail account with that general idea a little while back which I use for things like online retailers. It makes it really easy to filter those emails out of my personal inbox, which can be a pain sometimes otherwise.

The name+extension@gmail.com addresses would let you do something similar, but they've got a couple serious drawbacks -- many (in my experience, probably "most") websites will reject an email address with a + sign, and also it exposes your actual personal address. Using a separate gmail address solves those.

I do wish that Google would come up with a proper disposable email address solution.

Re:Abandon Your Real Name

[mhotchin]

If only the parent had *specifically* addressed this, and pointed out the major shortfalls with this method...

Use more dots....

[kootsoop]

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.

Re:Use more dots....

[__aaqvdr516]

This is exactly what I was going to bring up. I use the form (full_name_no_periods)@gmail for regular things. Any other variation is set to filter to spam.

Re:Use more dots....

[HiThere]

Well, I don't use GMail, but if I ever get things like that, I probably just assume that it's spam, or maybe phishing, and feed it to my junk filter. I've got to admit I never read the stuff carefully. (I don't even read the stuff actually adressed to me carefully. There's FAR too much.)

gmail plus sign postfix

[watermark]

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.

Re:gmail plus sign postfix

[whoever57]

MANY sites don't allow the plus symbol in email addresses (even though it's a valid character), so mileage may vary.

FTFY.

Seriously, having used "plus-addressing" for many years, I can attest to the fact that many websites won't accept it.

I know of one site where I did register years ago, but their de-registration page won't accept the "plus-address" that I used to register (rakuten.com, I'm looking at you).

Re:gmail plus sign postfix

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, Google allows also another identifiers than +. It ignores all dots before the "@" - so b.l.a.h@, bl..ah@ and blah@gmail.com are the same. The plus is better, but this is still an alternative option. :-)

Re:gmail plus sign postfix

[Shados]

Additionally, some of the bigger names in the industry of mass mailing are in on it, and for gmail specifically, if you use the + notation, they automatically use the real address under the hood. So it wouldn't help.

Re:gmail plus sign postfix

[vakuona]

Why not just reset the password on the account, close the account, and reregister.

Someone using your email address anywhere on the internet is the equivalent of a denial of service.

Re:gmail plus sign postfix

[raodin]

There are plenty of websites and services out there that are too braindead to send a confirmation email before associating an address with an account.

Re:gmail plus sign postfix

[bill_mcgonigle]

Speaking of postfix, you can put this in a virtual regex file in postfix: /(.*)\-(.*)@example.com/ ${1}+${2}@example.com

And then register on sites using '-' instead of '+'.

This way, I can register on ecommerce sites with me-somesite.com-883hj3af@example.com and when they get hacked or sell their list, they can deny that it came from them and either way I block it in an access file.

Unfortunately, capture doesn't seem to work on the domain side, so you need one entry for each domain.

Re:gmail plus sign postfix

[Tadu]

Additionally, some of the bigger names in the industry of mass mailing are in on it, and for gmail specifically, if you use the + notation, they automatically use the real address under the hood. So it wouldn't help.

The issue with gmail in particular is that a) it is unable to filter according to the actual recipient address used and b) it is impossible with any webmail I know to have incoming emails rejected, in particular combined with a)...

Re:gmail plus sign postfix

[Skreems]

Like Facebook. Hooray!

Re:gmail plus sign postfix

[sayno2quat]

The issue with gmail in particular is that a) it is unable to filter according to the actual recipient address used and

Sure you can. But you can't use the TO:"email+filter@gmail.com" field in the filter. Instead, use the field Has the words:"deliveredto:email+filter@gmail.com". The "deliveredto" will match the exact email address for the adressee, while the "to" field just matches the email after it has been resolved from email+filter to email.

b) it is impossible with any webmail I know to have incoming emails rejected, in particular combined with a)...

You can do plenty of things, such as applying a label, marking it as spam, etc. But you're right that you can't send a rejection email; you'd need to control the smtp server to do that.

Yes

[chill]

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.

Re:Yes

[Registered Coward v2]

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.

I generally do what you do. Most of the folks, when contacted, are appreciative. I generally simply ignore activation emails or simply cancel accounts.

I've only had a few problems. One is some sites don't realize gmail properly ignores periods in address names and will let someone signup with my address either without periods or with one in an odd place. Gmail, of course, directs all emails to me and I can cancel the account or ignore activation emails.

I had one person who insisted the email address was correct even after I explained I was getting emails for a parent of one of their students. The idiot sys admin went so far as to suggest I change my gmail account. I simply said, fine, any further emails about xx will be considered my property and that I have no duty to keep them confidential. I resisted the urge to email various teachers with a "I don't care about the kid, he isn't mine anyway and I have no idea who the father really is, stop e-mailing me..."when they contacted me about problems at the school and just dumped the emails to spam. I figured sooner or later the parents would miss an important email and all hell would break loose. After a while the emails stopped. Problem solved.

I had another case where someone signed me up to their mailing list. After repeated nice attempts to get off the list were unsuccessful, i started flamewars (it was a political list) by correcting each and very misstatement, sending cartoons of the opposite persuasion, questioning the basic intelligence of the list members, etc. Basic flamewar 101 with a bit of AFU advanced trolling thrown in. Eventually, I get an angry email from the exasperated list owner, accusing me of all kinds of things. I responded with a note saying I had requested nicely several tines to be removed but you were obviously too clueless to figure out who to do which necessitated my using a clue by four to get his attention and get my name off of his mailing list. As much fun as the flamewars and trolling was I really didn't need his stuff clogging up my in basket.

Re:Don't make an email account with your name in i

[ihtoit]

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.

I have the same problem

[hawguy]

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.

Re:I have the same problem

[NotPeteMcCabe]

You could definitely "accept their demand to delete all copies of the email as implicit authorization to do the work and then bill them for the work." Whether they will pay the bills is the question.

Re:I have the same problem

[AmiMoJo]

My mum contacted one woman who kept giving out the wrong address, but she didn't stop. She was booking all sorts of stuff like airline tickets, hotels, restaurants and so fourth. In the end I just cancelled all her reservations and tickets until she sorted it out.

Re:I have the same problem

[oobayly]

A colleague of mine did this with a restaurant that used his number in an advertisement. After informing them off this, they continued to use his number in subsequent promotions so he started taking reservations from people. That stopped it pretty quickly, probably due to their reputation going through the floor.

Re:I have the same problem

[gaijinsr]

I wonder whether this was supposed to be one of those "your mother" jokes or whether the poster really does not know the difference between "geologically" and "geographically"...

Re:Don't make an email account with your name in i

[Anonymous Coward]

yes... resumes where your email is "XxLegolaslover81xX@gmail.com" present a far more professional impression than something like "Steven.Alderson@gmail.com"

Re:Are you really that stupid? Jesus Christ.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Here's how I handle it...

[KennyLB]

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.

Re:Here's how I handle it...

[antdude]

Did they re(ply/spond) back? :D

Re:Here's how I handle it...

[shess]

I was getting some emails about an event of this type from a gal who thought I was her son. I gave a sarcastic response like this, saying that while I'm sure would be enjoyable, my wife and kids weren't really interested in traveling to Arkansas for my wedding, etc. She politely explained things again, so I suspect that the real son involved probably must also respond sarcastically, and I think she was kind of offended that I was making light of this important event. I switched into the mode I'd use to explain such an issue to my actual mom, it worked a lot better. I hope things worked out for them. *sniff*.

In the end, crafting the witty response was a fine idea the first half-dozen times, but after awhile I just got tired of it. It's not like there's any payback, generally these people aren't early-adopters who get a laugh out of it, they're already confused by all this technology, so my comebacks are basically just mean. It's not my job to fix things for these various people who don't know their own email addresses, so mostly I just filter the emails away and move on.

-scott

Re:Here's how I handle it...

[mkiwi]

Well, that's certainly quite the experience.

I had a girlfriend from Australia for an entire year before she figured out that my email address was NOT her boyfriend's. I used to just bounce the emails from my inbox, but they kept coming. For awhile, I was "georgie baby" to some kind of computer illiterate girl. The girl was always talking about picnics and outdoor activities.

I guess a part of me wanted to become "georgie baby," but pulling a Cyrano de Bergerac was more effort than I wanted to go to.

I have to admit, it was very tempting to say, "if you write 'hey georgie baby' one more time, I'm going to f^cking break up with you," but I'm nice like that. :-)

Re:Here's how I handle it...

[brufar]

I received messages from a family talking to some college student about help with his drug issues. then got in a mail exchange for the same family coordinating holiday plans, asking if I was coming home for holidays and when I would be there. I responded nicely several times telling them they had the wrong email address, and please would they all remove me from their address books, then please contact Matt in VA and get his correct email, because I am Mark and I live in OH. My plea went unanswered as they continued to include me in their messages. I finally had to RESORT TO YELLING AND BEING NASTY before they finally removed me from their correspondence. I guess being nice doesn't always work. Now if only I could get Matt to quit using my email address in the stupid redbox. There is no way to opt out of notifications from the redbox when people enter your email when renting or returning a movie. I wonder how dense you have to be to continually enter the wrong email address as your own.

Re:Name?

[mvar]

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

Re: Name?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean all non 14-17 year old boys are out of their mind?

Get off my lawn.

Re:Don't make an email account with your name in i

[Anonymous Coward]

from here it looks as if you might have to take your counting skills off your CV

Re:Name?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Send yourself a password reset

[wiredlogic]

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.

Re:Send yourself a password reset

[jonbryce]

That doesn't work with for example PayPal, because they ask all sorts of other security questions. I suppose it is very possible for someone to hack into an email account and then try to use that to hack into their paypal account and other things attached to it.

Re:Send yourself a password reset

[Registered Coward v2]

That doesn't work with for example PayPal, because they ask all sorts of other security questions. I suppose it is very possible for someone to hack into an email account and then try to use that to hack into their paypal account and other things attached to it.

True, but I've found companies such as PayPal will generally fix such a problem when you raise the issue.

Unsubscribe or filter

[hism]

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.

Relevant xkcd

[Karganeth]

http://xkcd.com/1279/

Re:Relevant xkcd

[Wycliffe]

I have a similiar problem. I am the legal owner of a .com domain which cooresponds to a .com.au domain of a rather large
Australian company. I receive dozens of emails a week ranging from people having problems with their orders to employees
of this company ordering stuff of amazon and apparently leaving off the .au on the domain. I originally tried to setup
autoresponders and autoforwarding for the email but it became too overwhelming. I feel bad when I see messages that are
asking about orders that never arrived, were damaged, or have special instructions and ideally I would bounce them so
they would at least know that they were not received but there is no way to do this and have a catchall in google apps which
is what we currently use for our mail service.

I've just been dealing with this

[xrayspx]

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.

Re:I've just been dealing with this

[pepsikid]

The funnest case I've had is where I actually get emails addressed to pepsikid@stupidcompany.com in my pepsikid@gmail.com inbox. This is when some company uses gmail as their provider internally, but using their own domain name. The system is remapping the email name wrong because some dufus at stupidcompany typoed their real email pepsikidd setting up the new employee/

Me too

[koan]

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.

Sort of similar...

[Skater]

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.

Re:Name?

[It doesn't come easy]

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...

Happens to me a lot with my own domain

[weave]

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"

Re:Happens to me a lot with my own domain

[volmtech]

Your would think a physical air courier service would be secure. I once found a large mailing envelope from "Emery" air freight in the middle of a potato field miles from any paved road. It contained contracts for a land development in Orlando, Fl. I am 90 miles north of Orlando. How they managed to lose a package out of an aircraft is beyond me. I resealed it and dropped in one of their collection boxes in a nearby town.

Re:Happens to me a lot with my own domain

[blippo]

How they managed to lose a package out of an aircraft is beyond me.

Imagining that is +1 funny.

Get your own domain name

[kiick]

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.

Re:Get your own domain name

[pspahn]

I've been using "me@myname.com" for awhile now. It's nice when verbally sharing your email address because people you don't have to spell it out to dense people.

Re:Me too

[koan]

Oh and Google needs to admit they fucked up and fix it, I'm pretty sure that guys info I got could lead to some sort of law suit.

Kohl's Cash

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Had this issue

[mdenham]

For what it's worth, GMail treats all e-mail addresses that are identical other than dots as the same e-mail address internally, so j.dunce@gmail.com, jdunce@gmail.com, jd.unce@gmail.com, and j.d.u.n.c.e@gmail.com are all going to be the same account.

I've noticed that forum spammers like to use that trick to get around "each account must have a unique e-mail" settings on certain types of forum software.

bah, you guys are no fun

[Garin]

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?

Re:bah, you guys are no fun

[foobar bazbot]

Gmail counts foo.bar.baz.bot@gmail.com, foobarbazbot@gmail.com, foobar.bazb.ot@gmail.com, and any such variations as the same. (BTW, none of those is mine.) If you own one of those as your gmail account, you own all of them, and nobody else owns any of them. Whoever entered that email was being stupid one way or another.

Anyway, whatever their reason, they put down an address that wasn't theirs but is in fact yours. This means when you were forwarding it to the "correct" address*, you were just forwarding it to yourself. They didn't thank you because they never got it.

* From your post, I infer you sent it to f.m.last@gmail.com -- if you mean you googled about and identified the individual from personal information included in the email, found an actual email address of theirs, and sent it on to there, that's different. (And IMO, that's way too much work to spend helping somebody who can't be arsed to double-check their email address on a form, and/or can't comprehend how email works in the first place.)

Re:bah, you guys are no fun

[Wow8agger]

I have a firstname.lastname address of gmail, and I've made friends with a pile of the other folks on gmail. Our absolute favorites are the emails and fanpics bound for this fine gentleman: https://www.facebook.com/RepoMattBurch

From: BEn xxx
Date: Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 2:56 PM
Subject: hey meat head
To: @gmail.com

  Hey I am a repo man myself as well as a bounty Hunter among other things.On your show last night you said(It's not like a bounty Hunter being a repo man you never know what you are getting in to)We fell on the floor laughing at your complete ignorance being broad casted on national television.I understand you can bench press 9000 pounds but that is only good for a dumbass like yourself to get yourself out of a jam when you open your uneducated mouth.You kill more flys with honey and you are a complete embarrassment to the industry with your short fuse temper.O yeah it was great seeing you lead away with those cute silver bracelets on your wrist.

Re:bah, you guys are no fun

[Maxwell]

Gmail counts foo.bar.baz.bot@gmail.com, foobarbazbot@gmail.com, foobar.bazb.ot@gmail.com, and any such variations as the same. (BTW, none of those is mine.) If you own one of those as your gmail account, you own all of them, and nobody else owns any of them.

This is wrong, but I hear it all the time and I really wonder why people think this is true? Try emailing your account at gmail without the periods. You may find someone else on the other end. I know this because my gmail counterpart uses my exact account without the periods. I get a lot of his email. Sometimes I forward it, mostly I don't.

  foo.bar.baz.bot@gmail.com, foobarbazbot@gmail.com can be two different accounts.

Re:bah, you guys are no fun

[karmawhore]

Google says that's how it works. I've tested it as well (and use it for filtering). From their FAQ.

In my experience, automatic forwarding doesn't always work properly -- say you have firstlast@gmail.com forwarding to realaddress@gmail.com, an e-mail sent to first.last@gmail.com may not come over.

I wonder if "dots don't count" wasn't always their policy, and whoever has your doppelganger account was somehow grandfathered in.

Re:bah, you guys are no fun

[Skreems]

Probably because of this

Gmail doesn't recognize dots as characters within usernames, you can add or remove the dots from a Gmail address without changing the actual destination address; they'll all go to your inbox, and only yours.

That happens, even with...

[MindPrison]

...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.

This happens to me a lot, too

[ShaunC]

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...

Haven't had this issue with GMail, but with other

[lamber45]

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:

• 1. As long as you still have access to that address, when you receive anything that is clearly misdirected and potentially of high value, deal with it politely. Don't use a "form response", instead personalize the response to the content of the message. CC the intended recipient on the response, if you are able to divine who it is. Once you've dealt with the matter, delete the whole thread. For newsletters, try following an "unsubscribe" action, if that's not available mark as spam.
• 2. Consider an exit strategy from your current e-mail address, no matter how much is attached to it. See the Google help posting "Change your username". For the new address, try a long nickname or full first name instead of first initial; or maybe add a string of numbers, a city your contacts will recognize, or a title. Give your important contacts plenty of advance notice, post the new address with the reasons you're switching [perhaps with a list of the confusing other identities as well] on your "old" Google+ profile. After a reasonable time (say six months or a year), delete your old account. Make sure you change your address at all the "various sites" you've registered at before doing so, in case you need to use a password reset function.

This happens to me way too often...

[enderwiggen]

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.

Notify the Sender

[nuckfuts]

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.

Re:Notify the Sender

[jodido]

I have a similar problem on Twitter. For some reason my account (a Spanish word) gets a lot of apparently personal tweets, always in Spanish. I always reply in broken Spanish that I don't speak Spanish--the functional equivalent of what nuckfuts suggests.

Re:Notify the Sender

[DeanOh]

This is what I do for mail that is obviously important (job interviews, requests about the health of relatives, etc): send a short note back saying "nobody here with that name, you have the wrong address...."

OTOH, for many years I have been receiving the emails intended for a very wealthy Orange County lady venture capitalist (who lives in big old McMansion in a gated community..next to the the polo field) who is into expensive wine tasting, fundraisers for the arts, who is shopping for a second home in Idaho and whose husband is into major wheel upgrades on his BWW. Apparently being rich doesn't make you smart about what email address you give to your friends. I used to let them know. Now I just see what their lastest extravagance is and move on. They can figure out themselves why their correspondents think they are non-responsive.

Use your full name

[DoctorBit]

In the 1700's and earlier, most people lived in small villages and went by a single name, like "Robert". In the occasional event when there was more than one "Robert", people would add a qualifier such as "Robert the blacksmith" or "Robert John's son" or "Robert from Westford". When people were born in and lived their whole lives in a small village, this system worked.

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.

Re:Use your full name

[qbast]

That's perfect use case for GUIDs! From now on, you will be known as b91c9121-0a17-4b26-a09d-d5980eb532db .

Re:Use your full name

[Kjella]

Meh, if we really wanted to we could. Here in Norway (that's +47 for anything international) we have 11 digit unique personal ids. So +47-[ddmmyy.zzzzz]@name.com where ddmmyy is your birth date and zzzzz your personal id (it encodes certain things like sex, century of birth and a checksum digit) would be truly unique. That number sort of lives in a double existance though, it's at the same time secret but at the same time known to a lot of people.

Making it into a public address would be disaster, it'd be full of spam but due to the government's use you couldn't ignore it. You couldn't - maybe there's an exception for witness programs and such - change it, you're stuck with it. I've had my unique ID all my life and I expect I'll have it the rest of my life, but with all due respect I don't want an email address first.middle.last@name.com were someone expects me to read it.

The weirder your name...

[tlambert]

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.

Re:The weirder your name...

[dbIII]

It's more fun for students to cite a paper authored by someone with a weird name when given a choice. Thus I chose the powder metallurgy review article by "Fishmeister" instead of one of the others for general background.

Re:The weirder your name...

[pureevilmatt]

...or to be cast in a Star Trek television series. Maybe the two are linked?!?

Would you do that to someone you know?

[tlambert]

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.

Re:Would you do that to someone you know?

[Anonymous Coward]

This. It's my damn email address, and I get all the shitty spam from accounts where people use my email.
Don't want me to delete your shit? Use your own email address.

Forgotten password?

[mwvdlee]

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.

Favorite AOL Profile

[Chewbacon]

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."

You may be in trouble!

[defaria]

You're in a deep load of shit if the email contains:

DISCLAIMER: This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify the system manager. This message contains confidential information and is intended only for the individual named. If you are not the named addressee you should not disseminate, distribute or copy this e-mail. Please notify the sender immediately by e-mail if you have received this e-mail by mistake and delete this e-mail from your system. If you are not the intended recipient you are notified that disclosing, copying, distributing or taking any action in reliance on the contents of this information is strictly prohibited.

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...

Re:You may be in trouble!

[kasperd]

This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed.

If you received the email, chances are it was addressed to you. If it was unintentionally addressed to you, then it was still addressed to you.

I consider disclaimers of the kind you quoted to be spam or maybe just a violation of netiquette.

I do however not consider those disclaimers to be legally binding in any way, since they have clearly not been accepted by the recipient of the email. If you have your own mailserver, and you do want to distribute such mails but are worried about the legal implications, then consider the following approach.

Before the mail server starts receiving a mail, it sends information in the human readable part of any of the previous replies to the client, that by sending mail to the server, the sender grant you rights to distribute the email as you see fit, and any legalese in the email itself is void, and by sending an email to the server, you accept the terms provided by the server.

Such a message provided by the server before the email is transferred would be at least as legally binding as the disclaimer in the email itself.

This happens to me all the time

[ElScorcho]

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.

Buy your own Domain

[pubwvj]

Buy your own Domain. It's ~$10/yr.
Setup a web server. It's free to $10/yr or so.
Have total control. Works.

Happens all the time...

[powerlinekid]

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.

Pretty sure the month was September

[Hognoxious]

Like "j.smith1997@nowhere.nul", where the number is something significant to you, maybe the year you were first on the Internet.

You seriously expect me to remember if it was 2010 or 2011? What do you think I am, a historian or something?

Re: Pretty sure the month was September

[Dan541]

Like "j.smith1997@nowhere.nul", where the number is something significant to you, maybe the year you were first on the Internet.

You seriously expect me to remember if it was 2010 or 2011? What do you think I am, a historian or something?

There's a thing called an address book. If you Google for it you should find plenty of resources.

Or better yet

[frovingslosh]

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 started getting emails congratulating me on my

[Marrow]

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"

I'm the exception... ^_^

[s0litaire]

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.

Lawyers. Who needs 'em

[sedmonds]

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.

Gmail/Google bug

[Vrallis]

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.

Re:Gmail/Google bug

[Rick Zeman]

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.

No, Google specifically touts that as a feature. Look for another reason why you're getting the other person's mail.

Same last name

[Rick Zeman]

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.

Re:Same last name

[mjwx]

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.

Have you ever tried typing with hooves?

Congratulations!

[kheldan]

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.

Re:Congratulations!

[BrokenSoldier]

Why should my wife and I, very early Gmail adopters, sacrifice our emails that we have for 8 years because Gmail can't fix it? I don't understand how if my wife had her email in 2005, someone else that got it in 2011, who was child in 2005, could get it in the first place.

Re:Congratulations!

[kheldan]

You're assuming there is some way to make Google give a damn. News Flash for you: They don't, and won't. Dump the account.

Re:Don't make an email account with your name in i

[ihtoit]

damn.

Re:Shitcan it

[stderr_dk]

sudo mod parent up

Anonymous Coward is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.

Re:This happens to me a lot...

[Kiffer]

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!

I was logged in! honest I was!
The trip to Boston was great, I don't think I've ever felt so lucky or grateful...
I see lots of people here saying things like "if it's not for you it's spam" and "log in to the service, change their password and change the email address"...
To be honest I think these are jerk ass moves.
If it's an honest mistake then you should try to help the person out.
If it's important then you would want them to help you.
Sure it's not a mistake you might make but you make other mistakes in life and it's handy when people catch them before the shit hits the fan...
and not in a "Ha Ha! you made a mistake and now I can make you look bad" kind of way but in a "uh oh, this guy dropped his wallet with the only pictures of someone important, I'd better get it back to him"...
There is always something that you'll need help with.

Re:Any of you with the same problem had funny ones

[Kiffer]

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 :)

"Forgot Your Password?"

[Robotech_Master]

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.

uh what?

[Tom]

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.

Same Issue

[HiChris!]

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.

Me too

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

It's Not Your E-mail Address, It's Your Name

[DERoss]

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.

Do It Like A Boss !

[vawarayer]

takedown notice !

Re:Haven't had this issue with GMail, but with oth

[chameleon3]

Consider an exit strategy from your current e-mail address, no matter how much is attached to it.

Why should I change? They're the ones who suck.

Easy enough, an AOL user could do it...

[DontScotty]

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.

Same problem

[tompaulco]

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.

"lost password" is your friend.

[alanshot]

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?

Re:Haven't had this issue with GMail, but with oth

[Maxwell]

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...

Re:Name?

[Dan541]

Because the choice is between using you real name or something grossly inappropriate. No there can't possibly be a sensible middle ground here.

Re:Why are you opening email from an unknown sende

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Tell me about it!

[Dan541]

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.

You need to follow someone before they can DM you on twitter. Tell another lie.

Obligatory: xkcd

[crazyvas]

xkcd has this covered as usual:

http://xkcd.com/1279/

I do not get emails that was inteded for others

[houghi]

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.

That's just set up badly

[dbIII]

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.

Re:Had this issue

[garryknight]

I've had mail intended for someone whose name is the same as mine but who uses the firstname.lastname form. It may just be that his name is Gary rather than Garry and is a sloppy typist. But I'm concerned about few things:

1) How much of my email has he received that I haven't seen?
2) What has he unsubscribed me from?
3) If Gmail treats firstname.lastname the same as firstnamelastname then why do they allow both to sign up for separate accounts? Don't they check for existing name when you sign up?

This looks like yet another security blunder on Google's part.

It's spam

[allo]

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.

Re:Name?

[technos]

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.

play the game

[gedeco]

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.

yahoo's new old email reactivation

[jupiterssj4]

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.

Call me lazy, but...

[segin]

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.

Re:Tell me about it!

[segin]

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.

You need to follow someone before they can DM you on twitter. Tell another lie.

Unless you allow them to DM you without having to follow them.

Re:Had this issue

[mdenham]

With respect to point 3, they shouldn't be allowing that. (And, in fact, a quick test on attempting to create accounts that are distinct solely by addition/removal of periods shows that they don't. It even mentions in the message rejecting the address that they do this.)

As far as sloppy typing, well, the only real solution to this is moving to a firstname.lastname.randomstring@gmail.com email address. The odds that someone has a similar name to you and picks a random string that's somehow relevant to them and has similar relevance to you such that you would pick it as well, are quite a bit lower than simply relying on the vagaries of what your parents thought it would be cute to call you.

Short & Sweet

[donak]

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.

But the entertainment value is so high...

[SpasticMutant]

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.

Re:Are you really that stupid? Jesus Christ.

[Skreems]

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.

Get them also

[Albert71292]

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 pain but not a PITA

[Bryan Bytehead]

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 /.?

Baby Shower

[paulskinner]

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"

Re:Why are you opening email from an unknown sende

[segin]

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.

Re:Shitcan it

[segin]

sudo make me a sandwich

Re:Name?

[segin]

So anything not my real name is grossly inappropriate? So, e.g. I should not use segin@somerandomdomain.net?

Re: Name?

[segin]

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.

Re:Shitcan it

[stderr_dk]

sudo make me a sandwich

As my signature says: make it yourself

use mail rules

[csdarknightcs]

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

Re:Don't make an email account with your name in i

[JamieIanMacgregor]

Firing squad

Be a freakin' human!

[Phreakiture]

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.

Re:Be a freakin' human!

[Phreakiture]

Thanks for the validation. Too often, participants on /. tend to forget that they're dealing with human beings who sometimes make mistakes.