Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Asks: Have You Ever Gotten Someone Else's Email? (ieee.org)
Wave723 shares an article from IEEE's Spectrum:
I was scrolling through emails on my phone one recent morning when a strange message appeared among the usual mix of advertisements and morning newsletters. It was a confirmation for an upcoming doctor's appointment in New York City, but came from an address I'd never seen before. And at the top, there was a friendly note: "I guess this is for you :)" The note, I would later learn, was written by a Norwegian named Andre Nordum whose email address is just a few letters different from my own... he'd Googled my name to try to track down my personal email address and forward the message to me.
All day, I thought about Andre's act of digital kindness and the heartwarming fact that a stranger had spent time and effort trying to send me a bit of important information. I also felt a twinge of guilt: I'd received emails in the past -- from car dealerships and daycares -- that were clearly meant for other people, and I'd never forwarded any of them along.
The 33-year-old Norwegian banker later joked that he did it because "I did not want to get emails about your dermatology history for the foreseeable future." But another Norwegian has been returning mis-directed emails for over a decade with mundane stories about the family dog and games of pickleball -- meant for another E. Nordrum.
"It's a little bit like sitting on the bus or overhearing somebody in the restaurant or something," he says, admitting that when they finally stopped coming, "I was a little bit sad, actually." In 2017 the other E. Nordrum flew from America to Norway on a vacation, finally meeting the man who'd been returning all his mis-addressed emails -- and they ended up talking for hours.
The article calls it a reminder "of how downright pleasant it can sometimes be to interact with strangers on the Internet." But it also asks an interesting question: "Do these email mix-ups happen to everyone? " I know I'm still getting emails about a storage space somebody opened 1300 miles away. And Slashdot reader antdude writes, "A few days ago, I got an USC.edu's doctor email (CCed with a few other people) about an upcoming surgery for a transplant. I was like huh?"
How about the rest of Slashdot's readers. Have you ever gotten someone else's email?
All day, I thought about Andre's act of digital kindness and the heartwarming fact that a stranger had spent time and effort trying to send me a bit of important information. I also felt a twinge of guilt: I'd received emails in the past -- from car dealerships and daycares -- that were clearly meant for other people, and I'd never forwarded any of them along.
The 33-year-old Norwegian banker later joked that he did it because "I did not want to get emails about your dermatology history for the foreseeable future." But another Norwegian has been returning mis-directed emails for over a decade with mundane stories about the family dog and games of pickleball -- meant for another E. Nordrum.
"It's a little bit like sitting on the bus or overhearing somebody in the restaurant or something," he says, admitting that when they finally stopped coming, "I was a little bit sad, actually." In 2017 the other E. Nordrum flew from America to Norway on a vacation, finally meeting the man who'd been returning all his mis-addressed emails -- and they ended up talking for hours.
The article calls it a reminder "of how downright pleasant it can sometimes be to interact with strangers on the Internet." But it also asks an interesting question: "Do these email mix-ups happen to everyone? " I know I'm still getting emails about a storage space somebody opened 1300 miles away. And Slashdot reader antdude writes, "A few days ago, I got an USC.edu's doctor email (CCed with a few other people) about an upcoming surgery for a transplant. I was like huh?"
How about the rest of Slashdot's readers. Have you ever gotten someone else's email?
I've had some amusing text conversations with wrong numbers (both by me and others). Turns out most people have a sense of humor.
My mother signed up for GMail back in 2004 and got her firstname.lastname@gmail.com.
Two years ago she began getting unsolicited "link your Google account!" and UPS delivery notifications for someone with (apparently) the same name--and very poor typing skills--in the Bronx. (We live in the Pacific Northwest.) No big deal.
Then the Pinterest, LinkedIn and Facebook messages came. And the Craigslist ad responses. And the diet program e-mail. And the online purchase notifications. And a hundred coupon and bank loan things. I cannot believe how much mail this person must be missing. They must think e-mail is a terribly unreliable medium. (It is, of course, but not for this reason.)
There was nothing we could do but get her a new e-mail address. Now she's a happy FastMail customer.
I have (my) firstname.lastname@gmail.com. I've never run across anyone else with the same name as me in person, but apparently we all use Gmail (except for the guy who works for GM and has firstname.lastname@gm.com.) I get someone else's email at least every couple weeks; insurance quotes, receipts for online orders, medical records, overdue library books, band practice times, etc etc etc. I actually have a form letter:
> I don’t know who you are. You have reached the wrong Firstname Lastname, regardless of if you originally emailed firstnamelastname@gmail.com or firstname.lastname@gmail.com
> Long story short, firstnamelastname@gmail.com and firstname.lastname@gmail.com are the same email address as far as Gmail is concerned. They are both delivered to me. This is my least favorite Gmail feature. Please remove both from any mailing list you might operate. I suspect your Firstname Lastname has a middle initial somewhere in their address that they forgot to give you.
> Please see this support article from Google for more information: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150?hl=en
I keep getting emails that are clearly meant for some prince living in Nigeria or something.
The funniest part is, I forward his emails to the Publishers Clearing House!
#DeleteFacebook
My Gmail address is in the format of firstname.lastname, and unfortunately not everyone who shares my first and last names or knows someone who does realizes that it doesn't belong to them. Sometimes it's a missed middle initial, sometimes it's pure ignorance on the part of the person providing the address. I think sometimes people give it as a fake address, and I have contempt for these people.
I have received all kinds of emails for wedding invitations, human resource confidential data, billing, mortgages, and more.
If the sender is a personal address, I respond with a polite correction. If it's important billing information (ie, "service about to expire for non-payment"), I do what I can to make contact to the correct person so they can be aware. I'm amazed at how few responses I get, and out of the few responses I get I'm amazed at how many people seem to resent me trying to be helpful.
Facebook doesn't authenticate email addresses you put in. I've been getting notifications for some Mexican dude for years about every little comment he gets on FB.
At one point, I received some emails intended for the CEO of some Chinese company. They had a bunch of financial reports in them about things I couldn't understand. That was fun.
However, the worst reason why I get e-mails addressed to somebody else in my personal account is due to Google ignoring dots in e-mail addresses, so myemail@gmail.com, my.email@gmail.com and m.y.e.m.a.i.l@gmail.com are the same. I am getting e-mail for somebody that is at least 3k miles away, including a Walmart and Victoria Secret mailing lists. And reservation tickets for flights.
I actively unsubscribe them from whatever service is sending me the email
If it comes from a human (Aunt Sally for instance), I have an Outlook macro that generates a fairly convincing bounce message. That normally works. For the more persistent aunts, I will loop the macro so it sends them 3 dozen bounces for every one incoming misdirected email. They wither soon after.
Occasionally it's something like a new dropbox account or the like. I'll sign in, change the email to a disposable address (e.g., mailinator), confirm the account change, change the password to random gibberish and logout.
Ah, technology.
Most of them have been for others in my organization with a similar name.
Occasionally I get one from a mutual acquaintance for someone with a similar first name or email address.
In all cases I think it's either the sender picked the first name that "auto-completed" when he typed it or he just guessed the name and got it wrong.
For several years I was getting e-mail intended for someone else with almost the same name as me (first, last, middle initial) and whose email address was identical except it was lacking delineators, but on the opposite end of the country. All of the messages were commercial in nature. I did some investigating and quickly found an obituary for the guy, so it was left to me to tell these businesses to stop e-mailing me because the customer they were trying to court was dead.
Much much earlier, I found a distant relative (confirmed via family trees) who had my exact name. Not long after that I tried to sign up for and AOL Instant Messenger account (yes, it was THAT long ago) and discovered that he had already gotten an account with our shared name! I had to misspell my name, dammit.
I haven't recently, but I did in college.
In college we were allowed to pick our own email handles. I chose a rather unimaginative one based off my actual name. It just so happened, though, that that combination of letters was the same as the (somewhat obscure) nickname of someone else on campus.
I got more than one email from his fraternity brothers and close friends who had guessed at his email, and had the campus LDAP server confirm that yes, that nick was a valid email.
If it seemed like something important (e.g. requests for him to do something) I responded to the sender and let them know it was a wrong address. (I never emailed the guy, though -- in fact, I don't know what his real name was. I only found out it was his nickname because one of the people I replied to apologized and mentioned that fact.)
I bought the domain of company that went bankrupt. After one year of not accepting any mail on that domain, I turned on catch-all and since then the flow of emails has not subsided. I have a list of all their previous employees now and a good idea what each of them did. Amazing how many emails are sent "fire and forget", completely disregarding errors and without any indication whatsoever that they have been read.
I have a pretty rare name and internet alias, which I use in my email addresses, and since I got my own internet connection about 19 years ago, I can't recall ever having gotten someone else's mail, or my own mail forwarded to me from someone else.
Most recently someone signed up for ebay using my email address. Same as others, firstname.lastname@gmail.com, Iâ(TM)m in the US.
To date:
Two different people using it to sign up for their three account in the UK
One landscaping quote in the UK
Three golf course reservations in the UK
Multiple airline ticket confirmations from all over
Emails asking for follow up in person interviews in the US and UK
For the interview emails Iâ(TM)ve responded saying that whoever they interviewed they gave the wrong email address, and received thank you notes.
At this point I get about an equal amount of mail for myself as for other people. Iâ(TM)ve tried sorting it out, but three only does customer support over twitter, and never fixed the first account when I DMâ(TM)d them. For EBay I never responded to the âoeverify my accountâ email, but that didnâ(TM)t seem to matter.
My name is Simon and I'll be your Operator today. Though I generally don't bother reading your email. Clickety click.
When I worked for a government contractor, I sometimes got emails from people in the USAF who were trying to reach someone with my same first and last name who worked at a USAF base. Sometimes the emails contained information which was unclassified, but was clearly not something that they wanted to be public. I told the sender that I wasn't the droid they were looking for, and also let our infosec guys know.
I have a five character gmail address that is both a common first and last name. I get misdirected emails every day. So far I have gotten emails for:
* Companies (same name)
* Doctors.
* Sons, daughters, dads, etc.
* Contract details.
* Job offers.
* Politicians.
Sometimes I reply politely and let them know of the error. Sometimes I play games to see whats the most crazy thing I can rely and get people to believe (only to update later and let them know).
My email is in firstname.lastname@gmail.com format. It's a German last name, so I get lots of emails from Germany and Switzerland. And frequent emails from Sweden and until recently from Australia.
I can bucket them into two categories, personal emails from one person to another, I reply to these informing the sender. The other type is one where people need an email address to log into a website, so I receive emails, like "Please confirm your account". These aren't spam because they are reputable sites. I don't like these. It's annoying when someone else uses your email and when sites just need an email address without conforming the email. Until recently I was receiving an amateur porn listing.
Once, when I was email responsible (-90's). Our ISP sent email to admin (me) because of their fault. Horrible, I hated it, the real recipient hated it, ... really horrible.
I have a domain name similar to a financial company and every month or two someone sends an email to me instead of their broker. Sometimes I respond, but often I delete it without bothering to read the email.
Working for a big tech company a few years back, a person quite senior decided to leave and set up a discussion list (intended for a single use) to say good bye to everyone he'd ever worked with over the past... 21 years I think, it had people both high and low, co-founders & current CEO to rank and file... and correctly ACLed to only let him send to it.
A few months after he left, someone external (to the company) accidentally CCed that very same DL (never heard if it was similar to something they meant to include), but the external thread, shared with several thousand people at another company did contain some sensitive (to them) information which went on for a few messages, of course resulting in the normal Bedlam result of like "Remove me" "Remove me too!" style responses.
Turns out the ACLs on the DL had expired upon his corporate account, and it was only a matter of time until someone accidentally (or deliberately) hit it.
This also happens with the fun of email address reuse. At that same company, I received notification of credit card statement updates and playgroups from a few different people/companies, as the previous owner of the (work) address had used it for quite a few personal things. Thankfully I was nice and would reply with "____ no longer works here, nor has access to this address, so I'm afraid I cannot pass along your message'.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Ever since switching to my own domain several years ago, I haven't received a single e-mail intended for someone else. It used to happen with my Gmail account on occasion, but even then it was relatively rare for me, given that I'm the only person in the world with my first and last name.
c6gunner don't try mock apk who built a program others on /. like/use/praise if you have zero to your credit that way. You impersonating /.ers crossed the line too. You got what you deserve c6gunner.
This lady in the UK decided that my address would be great to give fake info in forms. I finally found her on linkedin and sent her an email to stop that shit and I 'think' it worked. She never replied, but the spam is just a trickle of sports betting and fake brands now.
I also had some super liberal Dr.'s old cell phone number. I kept getting moveon and change.org spam for petitions. Then came the antifa rally organization shit started and I finally told the Soro's people to stop texting me. There is only so much globalist conspiracy garbage a person should know about.
My email is my last name at gmail.com (doe@gmail.com - not real address). So I get Jerry Doe's paycheck statements from UK, Jane Doe's hairdresser appointments from San Francisco, Jesse Doe's phone bills from Germany, and Jake Doe's students keep asking me how they did on the exam (invariably bad). Oh and a collection company tried to collect Jeb Doe's dept from me. Strangely enough the company that sends the paychecks and the phone company do not validate the e-mail addresses of their customers/employees and do not not have a contact or a link in the email trough which I can alert them about the problem (these email are send from do-not-reply-to addresses). Neither does the Jane Doe's hairdresser, so I randomly cancel her appointments from time to time (the email has a convenient link for that). Hopefully this will create some excitement in her life and alert her to the problem.
I keep getting emails for some guy who has a small dick, judging by what they ate trying to sell him.
My main mail-adresses have all have the trait that they are
a) easy to memorise
b) easy to pronounce
c) easy to understand
d) easy to spell out correctly
e) compareatively rare/unusual
My last name has the exact same traits and I have a domain that is my last name.
On the plus side, I maybe get 5 e-mails per week on my main account that I have had for 18 years now.
So no, I haven't gotten somebody elses email. Maybe once a decade or two back. But generally no.
But I do understand that there are people/names/addresses to whom this happens way more often. Obviously.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Any emails that are clearly from a person to a person I "reply" to say they got the wrong person.
Any emails from a company get binned and filtered.
So I've held my GMAIL account since beta, back in 2003 / 2004 (I think). But yes lots of people assume everyone they know is just FirstName.LastName@gmail.com. The most interesting one is where I used to live I had the same name as a lawyer and city councilman. So even got all this campaign information, or questions came my way when he was running. The most fun one was not email but I got a call from someone wanting to be bailed out of jail! Similarly my phone number starts with an 8 and a local car dealer starts with a 6. Either they misprinted it at one point or in tiny print somewhere a 6 looks like an 8 and I get calls for the dealership (particularly service calls) a lot. So not just email people just don't seem to pay attention at all!
I have a gmail address with initials plus last name @gmail.com.
During the summer I got onto a school board mailing list, as they entered my email as a near-miss for one of their employees.
I sent the originators for the mailings MULTIPLE, polite, warnings by return email to no effect. Finally, I got an email with login credentials for the school board central computer. In an unencrypted Excel sheet attachment.
I eventually wound up phoning them long distance and leaving multiple messages, explaining the carelessness of their actions. It did stop, but not ONE of my emails was ever answered, and no acknowledgement was ever made.
Then I got a snippy email from one of their admins complaining about my multiple notifications and calling me names.
Jesus Wept.
In my Yahoo mailbox this year I received a doctor's appointment reminder sent to a Tibetan monk living in Ithaca NY using a similar (but by no means identical) Yahoo address. My Yahoo ID is the Tibetan-language equivalent of the word "God", and there are lots of similar addresses e.g. "God1@yahoo, god2@yahoo" etc. but my email address does not use my ID. However the intended recipient's address used one of the serial versions of my ID @yahoo.com. What gives?
Anyway Yahoo sucks, what would one expect from them except lousy security and a ton of spam.
Can you forward them to me? My mail is:
donald.trump@whitehouse.gov
MAGA!
Got their write-ups about their congregation for a few years. Laughed a lot. Finally did a reply all telling them to double-check who they are sending to. No reply to my email sadly.
Be Excellent To Each Other
Apparently, someone mistyped their gmail recovery email to my address. The guy probably sent a couple dozen recovery emails to my address. He may have been on the level, but I wasn't going to reply.
I received the approval for a €1.5 million mortgage, including proof of income etc.
It was mend for a doctor with my first name as his last name and I have an alias mail address with just my first name, in his case there should be a first name in front of the last name.
Interesting to see how well some people are doing but then I send it back to the bank who apologised.
For years I had been trying to get that nice and short mail address but it was already in use until one day it was available and I immediately claimed it. Later I heard my ISP locks released account names for 12 months before handing them out again.
Not much later I was receiving commercial mails on my newly acquired address, one of them from a travel agency.
Out of curiosity I followed the link in the mail to the account on the travel website but it required a password, I clicked the 'Forgotten password' link and received a new one.
Once in the account I saw an address in Amsterdam where the man was living and also noticed it allowed booking of flights, hotels etc against a credit card associated with the account, scary!
Again a little later I received a personal invitation to some event, I replied explaining I was not the person that previously used the mail address.
This time I received a reply including the new mail address of the guy and I could finally report to him that his travel account was dangerously open...
He told me he had forgotten this one and I handed him the new password and all was good.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I have had some odd electronic communications events over the years. An email I sent a decade ago bouncing back, or an email sent to me from long ago suddenly arriving. Those are easy to understand though, some email server along the route dredging up old logs, perhaps when a decommissioned server was rebooted.
But I got an iPhone in 2013 for the first time, and last year while going through the photos on the phone, I found pictures taken by someone else of people I did not know at locations I did not recognize. I do not have iCloud set up either, so that is not a related factor as a way the photos could have been miss-synced. The phone has never been out of my possession.
Any ideas about how this occurred?
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
As with my Slashdot, my email address is some variant on a word for a false name. So a lot of people use it to sign up for services which don't check that email addresses are valid.
I may or may not have reset a few passwords in retaliation.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
I got my main email address early on Gmail when it was still invitation-only, and I made it a common Christian phrase without any numbers. Consequently, I get emails meant for everyone and their grandmother, because many individuals, charities, and ecclesial communities use some variation of my email address, then give it out while forgetting to mention whatever numbers are supposed to be appended. At first, I did try to notify people, but I got tired of it because they just kept flowing on in. Once in a while I will notify people if it looks like I get something extremely important; once, for example, someone accidentally sent me money on PayPal and I refunded them. But most of the time it's just a huge nuisance. People sign me up for services that I don't want, or sometimes I try to make an account somewhere and it claims that my account already exists. It's messed up how many web sites will create accounts without first verifying an email address.
Incipiamus, fratres, servire Domino Deo, quia hucusque vix vel parum in nullo profecimus.
My real name is the same and my Gmail account name is very similar to another person's. To add to it, I have discovered that we were both born in the same hospital and lived in the same area as children. I no longer liver there; but he still does.
How do I know all this, because I get his email!
I got an email where the dude had the same address as mine except with an extra character their system musta not handled right.
I've been cutting down on meat consumption, it's not been easy. The misdirected email was a receipt from a rib joint;
> 10 x Cajun Boneless Wings
> 1 x Louisiana Rub Full Ribs
> 1 x Hickory Smoked BBQ Full Ribs
> 3 x Ranch
> 1 x Large Seasoned Fries
Talk about a sucker punch..
I have an email in the form of first.last@outlook.com and my name is fairly common, so I get stuff like doctor appointment confirmations all the time. I usually just call the place up directly and explain they have the wrong email entered. Medical places are super-paranoid about it because of HIPAA, so I don't get much pushback from them. Other times it's just some random web service that I either block or unsubscribe from if it's really bad.
I did have a pretty cool interaction this summer, however. I got a few emails from someone in Australia who was sending status updates about her farm and life there to her father in another country. I ignored the first few assuming it was spam or something, but when she actually sent pictures of some animals and the landscape, etc, I decided to follow up. Had a pretty nice few conversations about where she lived and where I lived and that was that.
I once got a LAPD application sent to me by someone who thought I was their recruiter or whatever. I replied saying they had sent it to the wrong address, and then I deleted the email. I never heard back from the guy, but I imagine he is this moment he is holding a danish trying to stand still next the Leslie Nielsen.
lose != loose
It's been a couple of years (2011), but for a couple of weeks I got multiple emails a day all originating from the Indian branch of a large global travel agency that you've most likely heard of. My gmail address happened to be similar to the name of one of their travel offices, and I guess that's what they were trying to use for their internal emails.
/I immediately deleted all of these emails and their attachments immediate after sending the notice //Always check your recipient address, folks
///And don't send unencrypted JPGs of other people's passports to complete strangers on a gmail account
Not just any emails though -- it would mostly be scans of customer passports and other ID, travel visa applications, etc. Things that should NEVER be sent by email in the first place, let alone to an external free address on hosted a different continent and ESPECIALLY NOT unencrypted..
The first bunch of times I replied with a friendly message pointing out their error, and asked to please make sure to use the right address -- but they kept sending things. The next few dozen notices I sent got progressively less friendly. No change. I briefly considered just ignoring them altogether but felt bad for their customers getting screwed over and having their vacations or other travel plans fall through.
I also send a direct emails to the main email address listed on the website of the travel office explaining the situation, to no avail. The only thing that finally stopped it was sending a nastygram to their UK parent company asking them what kind of Mickey Mouse outfit they were running by their ongoing efforts to send me their confidential customer information despite my continuous reminders not to. Although the emails stopped abruptly after that, even the parent company never acknowledged or replied to my notice. No one ever did.
So... Just keep that in mind should you ever 'need to' hand over your passport to a travel agency or have them help you with a travel visa -- no guarantee that they didn't forward it to a complete stranger using a free mail account on the other side of the planet. A less morally inclined recipient could have REALLY screwed some people over.
At three companies, I have had the standard firstname.lastname email address. At each company, there have been 2-4 other people with the same name, so they get firstinitial.lastname etc etc and I get all the emails by default. Doesn't take a ton of time, but the time I spend tracking down which of "me" a given email belongs to and passing it along is certainly significant.
I got a gmail address early on that uses a unique character name from a popular movie so I get these all the time. Either someone selecting a variant of the name and mistyping it, or just using it as BS e-mail. At the moment, I'm getting the Bank of America notifications from some guys business account this is always on the verge of being overdrawn, and a group e-mail discussion about some sort of reunion. A couple of years ago I got an angry e-mail for some Swedish actress after someone using my e-mail address posted something bad on her web site. I assured her that wasn't me and exchanged a few pleasant e-mails. A few months later I think she accidentally added me as a LinkedIn connection since it probably prompted her from recent e-mails.
I have my first initial and last name @ a popular service. I frequently get stuff intended for others. I've tracked a couple down and managed to find homes for some emails. The frustrating issue is when people make accounts for services. I have to close the accounts if I can't find the owner. In one case, I actually wanted an account there just beforehand, had to delete it and make a new one. I also get password recovery emails from time to time. (I do not forward those).
For several years, there was a supervisor in one of my company's main distribution centers that had the same name as me (I'm in IT). Our names showed up side by side in the company directory, so we would get each other's emails from time to time. The best one I received was from another shipping dock supervisor requesting forklift operation training for a couple of new employees. I considered showing up at the dock - I've always wanted to try to drive a forklift.
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.-Ecclesiastes 1:9
Like the ones I get for V1agra and C1Alis, as well as FEDEX NEEDS YOU TO CONFIRM YOUR DELIVERY...
Yeah. spam. I don't have a solution to this. If I did I'd be rich.
Corporatism != Free Market
Like others in the thread, I got a early gmail invite and my email is firstnamelastname@gmail.com. Over the years, I've gotten hundreds of emails that were not intended for me, including legal documents, complete mortgage application documents with SS numbers, legal documents, etc. I'm guessing the person that's giving out my email as their own is some kind of real estate agent, as I found their information and tried contacting them several times to advise him of the issue.
Same thing with legal offices that were sending them documents; a polite note explaining the situation usually fixes the issue.
One of the more recent ones was some kid that had signed up for a Fortnite PS4 account using my email address a while back. He recently emailed me to ask that I give him my email account so he could reset his password. His excuse was that he 'had spent a lot of money on items' and he needed the email account, because he didn't think anyone would be using it. Long story short, once he started getting salty, a copy was attached to a support ticket, so the account has been deleted.
If you can't be bothered with spell-checking your email address or verifying it's *your* address and get your jimmies rustled, whatever happens as a result is on you.
I used to get emails meant for a 'Mrs. HRC', but deleted them all because they appeared to be marked as Classified. Wonder what that was all about.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Having joined GMail when it was invitation only, my (initial)(lastname)@gmail.com address is deluged with mail for people who (mostly) have the same initial and common last name as I do. It's not exactly helped by Google's "all the periods are ignored".
I am amazed at the number of people who give the wrong e-mail address for their PayPal account, bank account, credit card statements, DirecTV, Netflix, etc. Some organizations are good at dealing with it, but many just say things like "reset the password and then delete the account", or "I'm sorry, we have no way to change anything unless you can tell us the account number (not in the message) and the birthday associated with the account." If it's an EU organization that's when I start wielding the GDPR right-of-erasure stick... you do NOT have my permission to retain or process this e-mail address. I've also found that calling the CEO's office can sometimes get the problem resolved.
There are lots of me, or at least people with the same first and last names.
I got my firstnamelastname@gmail.com address before all the other motherfuckers but that doesn't stop them forgetting they have to insert an initial, a symbol, a number or whatever.
So, I get mail for a fireman in New Zealand, a photographer in Nottingham UK, some guy in California, and a bird watcher in South Wales, a small business in unknown location in UK permanently late with its bills, an agricultural supplies salesman in Eire, and more. I get all sorts: apple product activation confirmations, hotel bookings, flight confirmations, tax demands, late payment warnings, the latest news on farm drainage.
I have tried to do the decent thing where possible and alert senders that they are discussing finance and business with the wrong person. This usually works out.
The bigger difficulty is when the person making the error is not sending to firstname but is the idiot who believes their own actual email address is firstnamelastname@gmail.com. I tried the polite way but doofus insisted on continuing to try to use my address (his actual real address has the word _info appended to the name but he is too dumb to remember). Eventually I emailed his business address book (he loves cc all) with the title "sorry to be an arse", attaching an image of a hairy arse and describing his idiocy and the fact that attempting to deal with him in a polite and helpful manner and resulted only in sour, moronic responses from him. Problem solved.
Some of the tidbits:
Apparently, I own a Hyundai purchased in San Antonio. It keeps sending me emails reminding me to change its oil. I've not been in San Antonio in 40 years.
I'm behind on my rent in London
I applied for a warehouse job in Manchester UK
I was an adult leader of a Boy Scout troop in Pennsylvania
I missed my dentist appointment in Tuscon
The HOA president in Santa Monica is VERY upset with the company that build the wall for our subdivision (3000 miles away)
One guy was trying to send an email to his son in the Army. Came to me. I wrote back informing him of the mistake. He replied with a nastygram, accusing me of hacking his email
Flight and hotel reservation for the 2016 Superbowl through Booking.com. Because I'm a nice guy, I tried to "call" booking.com to fix it. No human available. His reservation got canceled. I wonder if he ever got it fixed.
And the coup de grace...I'm also a victim of idiot gmail not respecting the first.last@ dot convention anymore. Some guy in california signed up for a name that would be mine except for the dot.
I know where he lives, his age, how much he paid to move (too much), what kind of car he drives. And his pet dog is overdue for a shampoo.
If it ever comes to it...he loses. I've had this account since gmail was invite only.
I have FirstinitialLastname@gmail, and wow do I get a lot of mis-addressed e-mails. Here's my canned response for those I do answer (I'm surprised nobody has posted this xkcd link yet.):
Sorry, wrong email address.
Here's a relevant comic for you (this happens a lot):
https://xkcd.com/1279/
Hold your mouse over the picture for more info
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
I'm first initial last name at gmail. I'm on a group email for people organizing pickleball games at a YMCA in Virginia, a mailing list for parents of kids at an english language kindergarten in Germany, someone planning their wedding in Austin put my address for all the photographers and florists and potential locations, someone in Alabama signed up for TANF assistance with my email, someone in Iowa's Redbox account uses my address, I've been on a group email notifying friends about someone's death in Florida, and someone in Illinois sent her an e-gift card for her brother's birthday to me instead (I managed to track them down on instagram and get it to them).
I don't even have that common a last name, so I can only assume that gmail addresses like jsmith are more trouble than they're worth.
Martin Espinoza is a horrendously common name. It's not quite at John Smith levels, but it's damned close. I have never been nice about it because I also get tons of deliberate mismessaging; not just spam, but someone (probably some disgruntled slashdotter who doesn't like me destroying his argument) is also deliberately signing me up for crap.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Q: What do most of these comments have in common?
A: Gmail
It is high time someone holds Google accountable for their negligent practices that violate even their own Privacy Policy. Google truly is evil.
Why can't we go back to using jumpers to configure slot adapter cards? Why? I say!
I got to be one of the first gmail beta testers back in 2004, and I was able to get fllllll.gmail, where “f” is the first letter of my first name, and “llllllll” my last name, both being very, extremely, muchos common. Say, something like “jsmith@goo”. So I get price quotes, family pictures, bills, notifications from hundreds of different people all over the world
signed up for GMail back in 2004 and got her firstname.lastname@gmail.com
Interestingly, every single report of this problem in comments to this article comes from GMail users, typically also with initial.lastname@gmail.com or firstname.lastname@gmail.com address.
Looks like an obvious namespacing problem: instead of cramming a billion people into @gmail.com, why wouldn't they split it into a large number of domains? With or without Google's cooperation -- for the former, Google can stop digging the hole and redirect new signups to spaces elsewhere; for the latter, people can do like you for your mother, and move to more competent mail providers.
I'd expect failures like randomly dropping incoming mail after accepting it at SMTP dialog to happen for redchan.it not for gmail, ran by the biggest group of supposedly skilled SREs. Is it that hard to understand: once you respond with a 2XX, the mail must be delivered? Spam fighting is not an excuse: if a well-behaved sending server giving you a 100% hammy mail gets classified as spam for a bullshit reason, you do give a honking reject not an accept+drop, capisce?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I have at least four (based on location in the country) namesakes for whom I get their email. It's almost always a sign-up confirmation, so what that means is they don't know their own email address.
Occasionally I'll get something important and reply to the sender letting them know they have the wrong .
I was an early Gmail adopter, so my address is firstname.lastname at gmail.
I get mail for a couple of other people from time to time, whose address is the same as mine but with numbers at the end. I forward them, assuming I can determine who it is actually for, mostly for the Judge in Texas or the Lawyer in San Diego. There are at least two others, a realtor in Long Beach keeps forwarding me property listings, and I got another for another guy in Texas who bought a bed liner for his truck, that wasn't the judge.
I try and forward them, or at minimum notify the sender they have the wrong address, simply because I would hope other people would do the same for me.
have been semi-frequently getting pictures of hotels and conference halls meant for a japanese guy. i've been watching his company foot the bill on expensive stays for years. pretty neat.
If you don't want others impersonating you, open an account. That would also allow everyone to ignore your stupid and constant spam.
There are a couple of people sharing my name that just cannot remember their own email when booking hotels etc. Once I got an introductory email to the new job of these guys got. Took quite a bit of back and forth of "Oh, but of course you need this information" - "No, I am not the person that you hired" - "But it says so right here". Guess in the end they deserved each other.
I have email addresses on several very popular domains that are very, very old and use a very, very popular nickname -- no letters, no numbers, just the bare nick. I didn't know they would be so conspicuous when I signed up for them in the nineties, but so be it.
I get a lot of misdirected email. A ridiculous amount of it, actually. People often inadvertently drop letters, numbers, and other differentiators from addresses, and they end up in my in-box. Sometimes I can figure out who they're for and forward them on, but that's the exception and not the rule.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
I had just started working for a hospital. One of the things that they STRESSED to us was that you shouldn't ever assume a patient by looking at a chart or just asking their name.
What happened? For the first three months I couldn't get payroll to get my information correct. I also got E-Mails that weren't for me. There just happened to be two people with my name, which is not a common name. Idiots. And this hospital offers "World Class Care", which is really Third world care if you realize that the U.S. use to have the best care in the world until The DumAsCrap party destroyed it.
three weeks ago I received an suite of emails from a Financial Adviser for a person with the same name as me. this included the one time password for their superannuation account and other financial details including medical insurance details. In an ironic twist I have been the head of IT for a financial advice business in a large bank. and happen to know that financial advisers in this country usually don't get involved with people's superannuation unless the balance is over $400K. It's scary that they could send this info to me, and they are lucky that I am an honest person as I - given my knowledge of all the systems and process involved - could have easily stripped that super into an offshore account.
One person signed up for a UK telephone plan with an email address of mine (not name-based), I couldn't unsubscribe from the emails without logging into their system, which I ended up doing, and posting a few notes on their Support forum that I was able to access this person's plan and everyone should quit the service because their security is shit. (I changed the email to something like NOTATTHISEMAILADDRESS@GMAIL.COM).
Right now I'm also getting someone's British Gas account notifications. I've also recently received Instagram account verification requests and shipping confirmations. (I'm in Canada.)
None of these allow me to reply to the notifications, or 'report' or notify them in any way, other than to log into the account it seems. WTF?
How is it these services don't require you to confirm a link with the email before proceeding? Even random discussion forums have higher standards, why don't UK phone carriers or utilities?
If I did, I'd probably think it was spam anyway and just delete it, which is what I more or less do with physical mail that I get from the previous owners of this house. They haven't lived here for 4 years now, and I still get mail addressed to them. The only thing I send back to the post office is their medicare stuff. You'd think they would fix that by now.
I occasionally get emails about online pizza orders made by some guy in Germany who shares my last name and can't get his email right. He lives somewhere in Berlin and likes thin crust pizza with pepperoni and mushrooms.
I had a domain one letter off from a big company, and their junk constantly ran into my catch-all. After telling them a too many times I just turned off the catch-all.
We have same FirstName and LastName, and different state. I see all his emails received, but not sent by him. (We are in touch occasionally to remind one another of this booboo by gmail) His email address is Firstname.HisState@gmail.com My one LastName.MyState@gmail.com Not a very common email address you think - I never see many email addresses TexasJohn or MikeGermany so that is uncannny too. But firstname and lastname are the same.. So I think gmail is using our Firstname and Lastname as keys and not our email address, and during some copy of db somewhere, some script went wrong and I see all his email forever. I see his full email account, he does not see mine. I tried reporting it - got told it could not be happening - well it is.
I have an email with FirstInitialLastname @ majorISP.com for almost 20 years now. My last name is not common, but it's not unique either. I've gotten many emails intended for others over the years.
The worst was with an apparently elderly person in Florida who thought my email was theirs, when it wasn't. I'd occasionally get an email for them, but there was no way to contact them to explain the problem. The worst was when their airline informed them their Thanksgiving week flight had changed to an earlier time that day. I used the 'forgotten password recovery' on that one, to try to get their phone number to explain to them, but they hadn't included their phone in their online profile with the airline, so there was nothing I could do. I always wonder if they made their flight. Eventually the emails for them stopped, so I assume one of their children helped them fix things, or they passed away.
Speaking of passing away, for 15 years I had a home phone number that was one digit away from the local hospice's phone number. At one point, someone apparently put out to the local medical community the wrong number for the hospice, and listed mine instead. Every other month or so I'd get some call at 2 AM from a frantic nurse trying to find a hospice bed for someone in her care who needed a transfer. I'd have to give her the correct number. I never got mad at them, since the poor nurse was always having a much worse day than I was, let alone her patient.
After about 5 years, apparently everyone who'd gotten the wrong number on that list had called me, and I'd corrected them all, so the calls stopped.
Perform the surgery. Who knows, you may be a natural.
I got firstname.lastname@gmx.de and for a while, I frequently got mail that was obviously not meant to me. Stuff like invites to meetings, invoices...
Eventually, one of the incoming mails contained a snail mail address, and I was able to contact the other guy through that.
Turns out he has actually the same firstname.lastname but @gmx.net. Apparently people were too sloppy to closely look at the address. They just went "oh, GMX" (which is a popular free-mailer here), and put the suffix .de in the address. Hence the mail coming to me.
Once I reached him by snail mail, he told people about the difference between gmx.net and gmx.de, and the amount of misguided mail slowed to a trickle. With one notable exception though:
The support of O2 was too stupid to understand the issue and failed to adjust the mail address. So the O2 invoices kept coming to me. That is one provider I cannot recommend due to the sheer stupidity of their support guys.
C - the footgun of programming languages
I've had my own domain name for 20(?) years now, and I (and a couple friends) are the only ones who have even used it, so I don't get any misdirected email, but...
My telephone number has apparently been inadvertently entered many times for various people. So I get calls (not robocalls) from people saying that they got a message with this number, or it was on a form somewhere. I also have a personal tollfree number (for relatives/friends around the country). For a very short time, I was getting lots of calls because some business had published their new tollfree number, but typo'd it and published my number. It was a mortgage company. I got lots of calls asking about mortgage status, even calls from other mortgage companies. These people would start spilling confidential info before I could stop them.
So many typo's, so little time to fix them...
Evel sent an email to my address around 1991 to confirm an appearance date, location, and price. It was a mistake.
He was to the point, with poor spelling and bad grammar. The amount was much higher than I would have expected at the time. The event was just an appearance, no stunts.
There's someone who seems to commonly use my email when purchasing products. She has the same first initial and last name. This has happened a bunch over the years. Often it's "We're happy you stopped in, please call us if you have any questions" type emails.
Last week I received an email with the VIN number of the new Ford she bought, along with instructions on how to install Ford Connect to locate the car and remotely lock and unlock it.
So I emailed the salesman (whose name was in the email). That email bounced (figured out later he'd left the dealer after the sale.) I just dropped it.
A week later Ford sent me a survey asking how satisfied I was. So I answered the survey (I did not receive an introduction to the service department!) I get to the end, and it asks me to confirm my contact information: name, address, and phone number. So I called her and left an message. No response. I emailed the dealer again, copying the General Manager's email this time. No response. I found the salesman's professional Facebook page and messaged him. No response.
So I put the story on the dealer's Facebook page. DING DING DING. I got an email within hours saying that they would remove the faulty contact information.
I've got $commonFirstName.$veryCommonLastName@gmail.com and there are no fewer than 4 other people (two in the US; one in the UK; one in India?) with the same name combo who have flubbed and have email sent to my address.
What sucks is that the senders don't give a shit. So I can't really do anything but flag them in Gmail.
The best time was when a woman sent family photos to my address using her verizon phone. So the from address was 123-555-1234, and I called her up and asked her to stop sending me pictures of a man in a santa hat. She was not very happy.
c6gunner your FAKEname's on a post impersonating me & worse is you altering /. user's words https://linux.slashdot.org/com... as I challenged you to show you do better work and you can't after you tried to mock me you hypocrite LYING loser https://linux.slashdot.org/com... .
* You're online FAKENAME trash c6gunner & a childish dishonest punk.
(PUTTING WORDS IN MY MOUTH TOO saying what I don't (on spectre/meltdown) https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... - bank on 1 thing fucker - THIS exposing YOUR DIRTY BULLSHIT is NOT going to stop...)
APK
P.S.=> Impossible to deny FACT of your FAKEname (for your FAKE wasted lie of a so-called life) on that 1st post link above you unbelievable pussy loser... apk
I signed up for gmail a long time ago, so I have a first initial, last name @ email address. I get emails all the time for other people that have signed up for services or doctors appointments, etc and given the wrong email address. Someone recently signed my email address up for an AirBB account and made a reservation. I logged into the account using my email and cancelled the account completely. Shortly after I got that their reservation had been cancelled too. Next time they should sign up for an account with their own email address and not someone else's.
I would guess anyone eigh an email address with no numbers on a popular free service gets a lot of wrong person emails. I let the sender know they reached the wrong person since i would want the same courtesy. I only had one person insist they had the right address since minehad a period between the names and the one they were using. They were sending me a lot of personal information and finallyfixed it ehen i sent them sn email saying any disclaimers not withstanding any further emails became my property to use as i saw fit.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I'm also Norwegian, and keep getting emails meant for others, as my email is my first name@majoremailprovider.com. I used to forward these to the right person, or reply to the sender and tell them that the mail was meant for someone else. But they just keep coming. So I have up and just mark them as spam now.
... I did.
When the boss's son got married, the firm had me give her an email in our domain.
I really, really, made a scene telling any and all how bad an idea that was.
Predictably, she sent out all kinds of shit, and recipients and the firm was challenged on several occasion regarding the content.
Sure enough, I sent the guy an email about a meeting and he forwarded it to her so she'd know where he's be.
She hit, "Reply to all ..." and I got the following shit:
Honey, I enjoyed last night very much but you are going to have to control yourself.
Your violence did not excite me, it scared me.
I didn't know you were like this at all.
I'm not into dom/sub and you should have asked me before you ...
Goddam.
I had to take it to him.
He finally got a fucking clue and got her a Gmail.
Shit.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I got my gmail address quite early, back in the invite days from another slashdot poster, so my address is firstname.lastname@gmail.com.
There is a doctor whose gmail adress is drfirstnamelastname@gmail.com but who must forget about the initial "dr" occasionally, as do some people he works with. I have never gotten any patient related stuff but I have received a few travel, visa and medical business related emails. Also emails directed to a plumber in London, someone who left their passport in a youth hostel, someone whose online order for a tie was messed up and someone who was being chased for some unpaid bill.
I have a friend in New York who knows almost the whole life story of her Florida namesake because Florida woman always forgets that she had to use a middle initial in her gmail account.
Dot(s) in a Gmail account get you wrong mail.
Yet you posted the same shut in the most recent story. Nobody is impersonating you. Instead, you are a fucking attention whore and spammer. Shut the fuck up. You have contributed negatively to the world and it would be a better place if you had never been born. Your software is garbage, much like your attitude and personality. Fuck off.
Not sure I should confess this one, but... In one of the early email systems I programmed, I made a little mistake in how names were handled. Had to do with a search function in the database that I was using, but no question about who messed up and I have met the enemy...
Under certain cases the email system would deliver email to the intended recipient and to someone else...
Suffice it to say that I don't want to go too far into the details. I don't think there was any serious damage, but I learned a lot about the importance of adequate testing, and some more besides.
Regarding email that's misaddressed to me, the most common cases involve Gmail where people assume (definitely making an "ass") that their friend uses the default name on Gmail. Not that my name is common, but there are more than you think and I was the first one to to sign up for Gmail. What really pisses me off is when they propagate the incorrect address to entire groups of fools and then the email keeps drifting in for months.
The worst problem is still the spammers, however. My primary email is not Gmail, but it's "catchy" enough to fall into the dictionary attacks.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
My email address is my first name @gmail.com. A coworker had a blogger.com account back when the initial beta gmail invites only went to people who had one.
I get emails intended for various people all around the world, a couple a month. I always reply back and kindly let them know they sent it to the wrong person.
I've gotten tax papers, invitations to pick up Christmas decorations, recipes, receipts, and resumes. I've probably also gotten a couple amorous letters, but those are indistinguishable from spam so it's hard to tell.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
I've got the same first and last name as someone in my 80 person infrastructure dept at a mid-sized software company. The other guy has been here for 9 years, and is a director/lead architect and I'm a juniorish infrastructure developer. I've gotten some interesting and sensitive emails/voicemails/linkedin messages.
I'm getting e-mails from banks and credit cards and other things of that nature because someone typo'd their email as mine. I keep requesting an "unsubscribe" but not sure if that's the right move.
I have my own domain, so I get all email that goes to my domain. A company recently launched and apparently they didn't know their own name. For a brief period I got a ton of email for the company. I could even see MY domain name in their signature.
I emailed back to a few of the addresses, and the email gradually stopped coming. I still get an occasional one.
"Know your own email address" really should be one of the items on a "starting a new company?" checklist.
Astoundingly often ... like others, I got in Gmail early and got a good address.
I'm not surprised that others wish they had my address ... I'm just astounded at how many people actually seem to think they have it.
All sorts of receipts and transactional emails ... hotels, online shopping, tire places ... from around the English speaking world. Oh, and one guy actually had business cards printed up with my email address ... and apparently he is quite the player. Yikes. (Him I actually did track down ... he thought it was pretty funny.)
Got an email from Domino's in California; I live in Arizona. I called the store and told them I didn't order a pizza and to cancel the order, Realized awhile later that it was a wrong email and I shouldn't have done that, I'm guessing the person was upset when their pizza never showed up.
I have a very common name, and I get misdirected e-mail from all over the world.
Fairly frequently, I'll reply to let the sender know that they've got the wrong e-mail address.
Once it was billing info from a phone company that had the recipient's phone number, so I texted her to let her know she'd put in the wrong e-mail address when she signed up for her phone.
Sometimes they're commercial e-mail with a valid "unsubscribe" link, so that's nice.
The most frustrating ones though, are commercial e-mail without a useful reply-to, where the unsubscribe link needs you to log in. But it's not my account, so I can't do that... though there is a "reset your password" option, which I technically could use, since it would send an e-mail to *me*. I haven't done that, but it always makes me wonder, if I did, would I be breaking the law? Because I did "hack" that account. But does the account really "belong" to the person who created it, or does it belong to the person who receives the e-mail that the account is associated to?
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
I sent an email a few years ago to people I had thought were my friends about something bad that had happened to me. In response, one of those "friends" of mine replied to me by mistake. In his reply, he thought he was forwarding my email to someone who had bullied me constantly, but instead it went out as a reply to me. He appended his own message above mine, basically trashing and mocking me.
So in my case I quickly learned that this guy who acted like my "friend" was covertly my enemy, aka a "frienemy". This was in South Florida where most of the people I thought of as friends later turned against me. Thankfully, I no longer live in that hell-hole. Global warming will be a big benefit for wiping South Florida off the map.
Waaay back in 90s, I received an email at a Big Northern.edu for another Dr Joe (same last name) at a Big Southern.edu. My doppelganger had written an article in Scientific American, and the email asked more information.
It was easy enough to track down the address of the other Dr Joe, so I forwarded it. But I considered adding that article in my CV.... the other doc could claim my publications in return. Win-win!
Lose = not win
I get email "meant" for other users all the time. I'm sure 99.99999% of it today is spam.
However, about 10 years ago I open my email to find some VERY sexy nude photos of a 30 year old woman. Her boyfriend was stationed overseas at the time and she sent the email to cheer him up. He had the same name as me and one little typo in the email address sent it my way instead.
There was no text with the email and at the time the wife and I were swingers, so I figured it was someone from one of the swinger sites trying to get our attention. When we responded to the email she was embarrassed to say the least and explained the story behind the pictures. We assured her that we would delete the pictures (we did .. still stuck in my head though, wow was she a knockout) and life went on.
I wonder if she every told her boyfriend about the email mix up?
I ain't gotten nuthin; But I have received many.
I have a common first/last name. So this is a regular occurrence for me. One time, I got an email intended for a different person with my same name, and it contained a racist cartoon. It was from someone in my company, so I was able to look him up in the internal directory and find his supervisor's name and contact info.
It was one of the most difficult decisions I had to make. Yes, it was a pretty nasty cartoon. But on the other hand, if I reported it that would mean that this guy would lose his top-secret security clearance, his job, and probably have a huge impact on his family. But then again, if I tolerated it the same could happen to me.
In the end, I did the right thing (I think) and forwarded the email to his supervisor and explained the situation. I spent the next three hours on the. Turns out the guy who shared my name was a key employee for a major gov't contract. His supervisor basically threw me under the bus, blaming ME for not being a "team player." I was outright screamed at for "trying to sabotage a project crucial to our nation's defense" by the PM of the contract.
Thankfully, it eventually trickled up to an executive vice president of something or another. He straight-up fired the sender of the email, tore new arseholes in the supervisor and program manager, called MY manager and chastised him for not having my back, and personally called me to apologize for the company's initial response.
I've told this story a couple of times, but I don't like to think of it as "virtue signalling" because that's not the point of it. The point is, sometimes even when you make what you think is the right decision, you might catch a ton of shit for it. I had no idea that would happen, so I was caught completely unprepared. Hopefully, other people will read this and be a little more ready for what could come next (but still make the right decision, obviously).
Circa 1994 I was the systems guy and embedded development guy at a startup. We registered a domain using the initials of the company name. Non-tech companies were slower to set up general Internet mail and domains. Within a few months, whenever I scanned our postmaster mailbox, I found increasing numbers of emails directed to a movie production company which had the same initials, but who registered their domain with their full company name. People were lazy or were guessing, and used the initials.
I should have registered my own initials as a domain early on. That domain eventually was registered by a large bank with my same initials. If I had taken the domain first, they probably would have sued me to abandon both the domain and public use of my own initials.
Like a lot of you, I have had a Gmail since the invite days... InitialUncommonlastname@gmail.com. Except that uncommon last name is common in another country. I throw out most of the crap but do try to reach out on the rare occasion something looks important. I've used "recover password" and found people's home addresses. Taken a look on Google Street View. Sent them texts telling them I liked their rose bushes, etc. Asked many women with my initial to stop using my address for junk. Lots of fun with that. Oh lord do I love the ones where they threaten me for "hacking" their mail or using "their" email address. I just tell them to bring it onnnnnn. Dipshiats.
I gave one gal about 4 extra chances when I texted her to log into her account and change the contact email. I gave her the new password but she just kept on punching "recover password" and thus sending me another stupid confirmation email.
At least twice a month I get emails from a business in a foreign country where apparently they don't require 1-click opt-out links. They're wondering why I don't show up for my appointments. They also don't respond to my replies.
There was one occasion where I was getting on-boarding mail meant for a new employee at a company who used Gmail to host their website and email. It seems like their Google-hosted domain mail was getting internally re-written to Gmail addresses. So they set up InitialUncommonlastname@Googhostedcompany.com and Google just blindly forwarded his mail to me, at my long-already established address. Their admin didn't believe me of course. Those mails finally just stopped coming. They probably just made a new account with a '1' at the end, hehe.
The best story involves an interior decorator who sent apologies for not finishing work on time. I was feeling evil and wrote back saying that their services were no longer required. They got very apologetic and wanted to make amends. I wrote that their work was sloppy and we had noticed someone going through our lingerie. This went another round or two with shock and denials, but then they must have finally called their client. I got a hilarious final email brazenly apologizing for trying on the lingerie, and also for drinking 'my' expensive wine!
I own several domains, including one once owned by an internet service provider. You learn a lot about people that way! Sure I read the mails -they're mine now suckah!
Twice a week I get inmate headcounts, lists of inmates requesting infirmary, along with name, inmate number, social security etc.
It's a manual email list of about 20 emails of management in the "to" field, I've emailed 3 times over past 2 years but the email stops for month or 2 then begins again.
So I just made a filter to sort it all. It's hilarious getting federal prisoner private info along with guard requests, names, incident reports, etc.
Hehe
I thought about replying and canceling. ;) But since I had the contact information for the office I just called them and let them know. The message also included the phone number of the patient so I called her and explained the situation. We had a nice conversation. :D Sadly I never heard from them again. :(
For a while I was getting some kind of statement from what looked like a job shop in England. No contact info and of course a non-working return address.
The funniest one was one that went to a group of women in Australia arranging a girls night out. (I'm in the US.) I replied to all that I had no idea where that was but it sounded like a lot of fun and I was quite looking forward to it.
I run my own domain, and there's a company in another state which has a very similar domain name (only 1 letter different);
As I'm running a catchall on my email server, I'm constantly getting emails from their clients - or from services they've signed up to using their work email address, as they never enter their domain correctly.
The really 'sad' thing about all this - this other company is a Web Design company, & count the State Government among clients its designed sites for;
But it seems the staff are so useless, they don't even know their own business domain - as they always give out my domain instead of their own to clients.
Oh... and this business knows i exist, with a similar domain - because for the first few years of this happening I'd forward the emails to the appropriate staff member at the company & ask them kindly to make sure they give out the correct domain name.
But as that never seemed to happen (as i get just as many emails for them, as i did 10yrs ago), i now just blackhole most of their emails... and their clients are left wondering why they never respond.
And i wont mention about how utterly clue-less they are on security - they tell clients to email across FTP credentials to them to access their hosting server (and cause their clients have the wrong email/domain, they then send this to me).
A few times I got unexpected e-mails that was related to services like Facebook, Instagram, etc. that I never signed up! It's funny that I could recover their existing accounts' passwords and logins. Wow!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
its the 21st century. if u have recieved an email not addressed to you...good job !
text and email are 2 different things...duh...concentrate on the subject.
I, for one, welcome APK's Hosts File Engine. It is a work of art, a struggle between the forces of genius and madness. Clearly the work of an unrecognized star child.
Lolll "Protects against Spectre & Meltdo"
Hahaha
This shit is actually pretty funny.
Only once, when I was a fido point, with a fairly unique point number. Someone sent an email to one of the other points and mis-typed one of the digits. I got the mail, rather than the woman he was trying to talk into leaving her husband.
I have an initial.lastname@gmail.com address, but my last name is a relatively uncommon Dutch name. Every now and then I receive a personal mail (usually for some group event) intended for a cousin with the same initial. A simple reply usually takes care of this. I've once gotten a job interview related mail intended for my cousin.
My partner, on the other hand, has adverb.animalname@gmail.com as an extra address for newsletters and such. She gets dozens of mails not intended for her, from Facebook to dating sites.
I'm not sure what these companies are thinking but it used to be standard for pretty much every site that you need to CONFIRM the address with an activation link.
I have my initials registered as a domain. Flip two letters and you have the abbreviation of a state-level government department. (Not the USA, so they don't use a .gov domain.)
So far I have received two e-mails aimed at the department. They contained nothing interesting or substantial though.
One of those e-mails was apparently sent in the middle of a conversation, how did the sender mix up the address?
The other e-mail actually had a signature that said "If you have received this e-mail by accident, please inform us and then delete it."
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I've tried to track a few down with some success, but the only one I put much effort into was the one where I was getting the email confirmations and printable certificates for someone's continuing medical education courses to maintain their nursing credentials.
That one had a pretty uncommon name, and I ended up tracking down a phone number via an online publishing of their (small rural) church's member directory.
fencepost
just a little off
Yep I got in early and got one of those. I do try to fuck around with any false email that comes my way. The best one was when I got s snapchat password recovery. I recovered the account, and then logged in as them. I preceded to tell every female contact how I secretly desired to fuck them. This one girl said "but I'm your sister!". Prob married iwth surname change lol. I was like "well it looks so hot on Game of Thrones. Why not give it a go?" good times.
I recieve the payslips for a namesake in my Gmail every month. Without fail. I've contacted the employer and they've stopped responding, I've contacted the company in charge of the payroll system that they use and they told me to contact the employer. Initially I thought it was cute, I have a pretty uncommon name, and I had a bit of humourous banter with the employer about getting it changed in their system for their employee... but it never did. It wouldn't bother me as much as it does if it wasn't something so important. I've got all the information I need to seal this guys identity every month. I might have to write him a letter and tell him to sort it out himself for his own sake. My only other namesake that I know of in the country seems to be less scrupulous than I am. I got an email for him about a failed background check while applying for a job a few years ago.
I have a 6 letter domain that keeps getting emails directed to a company with a much longer domain name because they came into existence years after I registered my domain. For some reason they chose to use a name that starts with my domain name. If people forget to add âoebiotechâ to the name, I get the emails.
Also used to have my 4 letter first name @usa.net, and the old email servers use to append the domain if you simply typed in a username. So sending email to âoejohn smith@wustl.eduâ from USA.net would generate 2 emails. One to smith@wustl.edu and one to john@usa.net. I got a lot of very interesting emails that way. The only reason I did not keep that email is because they starting charging $19 a year to keep it. My mom kept hers, and she had a 3 letter name.
...it's mostly my own doing.
When gmail was a beta "invitation only" service, I spent $20 on ebay for two such invites.
In return, I scored "mylastname@gmail.com" email address and "myfirstinitiallastname@gmail.com"
My last name is not that common in the US (howmanyofme says about 18000 others share it). The same site shows 10 people in the US with my first/last name combo.
Why I didn't think about the consequences a little more and choose the less-easy-for-spammers-to-guess and less-likely-for-other-users-garble "firstnamelastnme@gmail.com" option is another question.
But: in the central European country my grandfather emigrated from (and two countries that border it), my last name is common. Real common. The fifth most common in that country and its neighbors.
So: I get a LOT of foreign language spam and the occaissional mispitched personal email in the last name only account. I try to identify obvious items of importance that have arrived by mistake and notify the sender (because I'd hope somebody would to the same for me).
The other account (firstinitiallastname) gets a LOT of mistaken emails. Sometimes I'll end up on the mailing list for churches/schools in other states (they are very responsive to "not me please stop" requests. Estimates for home repairs, pictures of family members, etc etc have all arrived over the years. Sometimes what are obviously important medical or professional emails (job interviews!) arrive and I let the sender know. This spring I started getting tuition payment notices from guys film school college in L.A....they are from a "do not reply/not monitored" account, so tough darts for him. Hopefully he knows his tuition is due.
The worst was a repeated, multi-year series of mistaken emails belonging to a very wealthy VC capitalist lady a few years younger and several tax brackets higher than me. She lived in gated community near San Diego (her giant house was literally next the polo club). She had very expensive tastes in wine, food and leisure activities (including both VC and non-profit fundraising events). She and her husband were shopping for second homes in Utah and New Mexico. Her husband frequently upgraded his vehicles (always high end BMW and Mercedes) and often then modified his wheels. One of his comments to his tire/wheel guy about a new rim selection was: "I like the shiny". I received pictures of her friends at a bachelorotte party for a second marriage that included lots of done up ladies in revealing evening attire. I know all this, because for all of her money, she NEVER once had the courtesy to respond to than me for the 10 to 20 times I told her that I had her stuff in my inbox again, and she needed to correct the contact info she was giving her peeps...so I accumulated unwanted knowledge about her life over a four year period before the spigot got turned off.
I wish there was a way to stop getting other peopleâ(TM)s email. Itâ(TM)s like playing Wack-a-mole!
signed up with gmail in the beta, picked up firstname.middleinitial.lastname@gmail.com (obviously not the actual email address but you understand the formatting)
someone else in delaware has firstnamemiddleinitiallastname@gmail.com
another user in the UK has firsnamemiddleinitial.lastname@gmail.com
another one in california has first.namemiddleinitiallastname@gmail.com
and one more from virgnia uses firstnamemiddleinitiallast.name@gmail.com
the 5 of us have been dealing with this for years.
weve all sat in a conference call with googles techs to see if the can figure it out thus far no luck. they refuse to acknowledge the problem exists
right now we each have our own folder to move our personal mail into and promise to not read anyone elses mail.
Got a mail not meant for me, sent by a girl to some girl friend of hers -- I'm a guy. Replied concisely and professionally. Got a laughing excuse in reply. Replied in the same vein, with reference to how the original mail tied in to my personal context. Exchanges continued for a few days, covering the fact that we lived several time zones apart, and culminating in "I really like talking with you, I have to ask, are you married?"
I suffer from having fairly common given AND surnames. And from the simple fact that a frankly astonishing number of normals seem to think that just using @gmail.com as their email address (registered or not) is their god-given right. So I get everything. Realtors' messages, offers from a yacht broker, medical appointment reminders, confirmation mails for every-fucking-thing from utilities to kindergarten applications, earned points announcements/statements from any number of airline and retail points programs... every.fucking.thing. It all started about 10 years ago when email penetration exceeded 40% of population in the US, but I get mis-addressed email from all over the english speaking world.
Steve -- If you have to call it a system, you don't know what it is.
I'm just a random, non-descript motorist, but I occasionally get email for John Perkins, author of Confessions Of An Economic Hitman. I have first/last .com. He has first/last .org.
I have an email that is first.last@ and this happens all the time. When I was a TA in college the teacher would write my email address out correctly, but in class only ever say last@. This led to a lot of people missing assignments, until I got a message from the owner of that email. They seemed like a nice person that it happened to a lot.
And it has happened to me. The latest is a preschool across the country. The one I had the most fun with, but never found the owner was with Twitter. Twice someone in the UK opened an account with my email. When I got the notice I change the password, and leave a tweet that say "Whoever opened this account send a DM if you want it back, you use the wrong email"
Several years ago, a sysadmin at another company was trying to set up one of "his" employees to work from home. When he created her .forward file, he misspelled her eaddr and wound up forwarding her company confidential email to me for a few hours.
I was able to get aholt of the admin and we solved the problem with the loss of only a couple of messages.
I have an uncommon last name so I can usually get 1st initial last name. Apparently, there are others.
If it's a new account, I reset the password and cancel the account. That usually stops future emails.
Sometimes I have to respond. Car insurance in another state. College work. Meeting invites.
I once had a coworker with the same name except he didn't have the last letter. With auto email lookup, he got lots of email intended for me. This company had 4 people with the same 1st name and last name. The 1st employee got the privilege of forwarding email to the others.
Since then, I've been in favor of having random numbers as email accounts, forcing people to use an address book!
Because of a domain I own and administer I received lots of emails intended for a small time media property with the same name (who, yes, tried to buy the domain from me for 4 digits in shiny new quarters or something). Most were standard production coordination but there were a few jilted girlfriend emails going to the I guess rakish producer. I made a point of not reading those but, unlike the production emails, I didn't forward them either. I hoped the distraught two night stands reached out again and communicated their issues and I put a "this isn't that company" banner on the front page for a moment until the space became too easy to sell.
The first time was some property management company around 1,500 KM and in another country (I'm in Canada, they were in the US). I asked nicely several times to have them stop, but they didnt so i decided to be a d*ck about it. they were not very nice, and the fact they were agaisnt Canada's unsolicted email laws didnt cause them to fix this any faster. It shoudlnt have taken 2+ months to stop emailing me about the daily operatoins of a condo.
The second time is still ongoing, where i get someone's 401k updates (no details, just telling me to login and review these fantastic new products).
I suspect this is from the same person, who has missed a letter in her own gmail account which happens to be my gmail account.
I'm tempted to mark it spam but it doesn't feel appropriate in a lot of cases. There needs to be a new way to make emails like this. The sender would get a spam like message but it would say it is a misdirected email.
Up until I sold my two-letter .com domain (not xy.com, but like that) , I got all sorts of interesting e-mails. I bought it in 1992 (before the web became a thing), and early on there wasn't much traffic.
Then the web came, and soon there was also xy.edu (a medium-sized university), and xyvw.com (a job placement agency), and xvwyur.com (a large open-source organization) and I got about 175MB of misdirected mail per hour by the time I sold it (around 2007). This included such oddities as:
(1) Internal e-mails from a major aerospace manufacturer. Somehow it got onto some of their internal distribution lists.
(2) At least hundreds of resumes intended for xyvw.com (probably many, many more).
(3) Thousands if not hundreds of thousands of e-mails intended for students and faculty at xy.edu.
(4) Several large group e-mail exchanges between participants in watersports events in Las Vegas. (Ewww!)
(5) Thousands of e-mail intended for the open source organization, including resumes, problem issues, &c.
(6) Hundreds or more notices with the legal disclaimers on them claiming them for attorney-privileged material.
Early on, I often tried to send notices to senders and sometimes postmaster@blah.org when I noticed inappropriate things arriving in my feed. It never helped, so far as I could tell, and did garner a great many threats and mind-blowing amounts of stupid. Once the volume exceeded a couple megabytes a day, I gave up entirely.
I have a very common name, and firstname.lastname@gmail. I get all kinds of things. Once I got on an American elementary school teacher's parent mailing list. I got everything, including a class list with kids and parents' names, addresses and phone numbers. She was rather embarassed when I e-mailed and mentioned the mistake. Took a while for the parents to stop replying to the old list though.
I also got home security system updates for a while. Messages like "Tammy at x street has gone to bed for the night." "Tammy has left the house." The e-mails didn't have any kind of reporting link, the reply-to address was a robot, and all the usual guesses, including webmaster, got no response. I sent a regular mail letter to her house.
One of the more entertaining was when some shady developer shared a folder with me on dropbox. I thought it was a colleague and accepted. He dropped a bunch of financial and planning documents in the folder, realized his mistake a few days later and quickly deleted them all.
There's this guy in another state, who is CONVINCED my email is his simply because his last name matches my email address (my first letter of first name + full last is the same as his whole last name by some quirk of fate). 3 years ago, he began giving out my email address to everyone. Because I get receipts and confirmations for all kinds of things, I was able to track him down in seconds, and gave him a call. Politely explained that he gave my email address to his doctor and he might want to correct that. He called me a liar and swore at me until I hung up. Gave it a month--and a few dozen more contacts from his doctors, car rentals, and mortgage company--and I called him again. Again, he called me a liar and swore at me.
At this point, I have his SSN, his address, his phone number, his cell phone number, his wife's name, his kids' names, his dog's name, what kind of car he drives, his mortgage amount and account, I know he has a nice new pool and hot tub, etc etc etc. I wanted to know none of this. I've taken to calling or emailing back anyone who he sends to my email to let them know. His bank loan officer was particularly upset that this keeps happening and admitted the guy yelled at him for saying the email address was wrong, too.
Some people refuse to learn.
I was an early adopter of gmail, and was able to get an address that's simply (my) firstnamelastname@gmail.com. I also have a fairly common name - there are a few hundred of me in the USA alone. One of those similarly-named folks selected the same gmail address as mine, but with a middle initial (firstnameAlastname@gmail.com). Over the years, I've gotten: his travel reservations, angry letters from his Mom, his credit report (horrifying!), a photo of his Dad asleep poolside with his junk hanging out of his shorts (even more horrifying!), and countless personal and work-related messages. Any time I get a message intended for this person that appears to have been human-generated, I respond and ask that they get the correct address for the person they wish to contact, and remove MY address from their contacts. I've probably done that 75 times over the years, and gotten repeat email from probably 2/3 of those folks. I finally realized that this person must either think my address is his, or he's just an incredibly sloppy typist and consistently omits the 'A' when he keys his address into a form. For a while he even had a website for his business that directed mail from the "Request Info" form to me! This actually finally stopped about six months ago - I'm not sure if this person finally got their address right, or simply stopped using that address, but I'm relieved to know that I'm not likely to get any more photos of sleeping PornoDad.
I can top this. In a trifecta of confusion someone with the same name as me tried to email someone else with my name and sent it to me by mistake. Probably the weirdest email I've ever gotten.
Idiots use my email address all the time as if it were their own for SERIOUS stuff like medical portals (which themselves are almost always terrible) and club/charity/friend/relative things that are obviously real. I send corrections when I feel sorry for somebody, but most of it I just delete.
The misdirected e-mails I've seen is when they meant to send something to an individual and hit reply all by mistake.
Especially if it's a guy responding to a chick.
Happens to me several times a week in Gmail. The first couple of times, I contacted the person the email was for, it was about a Verizon payment due notice for someone living in New York, After it KEPT happening, for emails meant for more other people, I just started marking them as Spam and deleting them. Still get account info for some guy concerning his Lloyd's Bank account. Never happens in my paid Yahoo Mail, or my free Hotmail account. ONLY Gmail. I think there's something screwy with Gmail's algorithms.
As a result, I NEVER trust Gmail with anything important. No telling WHO would get the email. These days, I mainly use Gmail as a "spam dump".
"A Bird In The Hand Will Poop On Your Wrist"-Benny Hill,1982
I got “invited” to get a “free” gmail account at the very beginning, so I have had the same gmail account since 2 days after they became available. Needless to say: they probably have enough info to 3D print an exact duplicate of me by now.
I have a very uncommon last name. Since I got my address so early, I have what might be considered a “vanity” gmail address in some circles.
A decade later, a guy who has the same uncommon last name and the same first initial gets himself elected the mayor of a small town. Either as an honest mistake - or more likely - because he is a self-important asshole, he starts giving out *my* gmail address as his return address.
Since this guy is a town mayor, the amount of email flooding in to my account was a torrent. I had to keep adding filters to dump his mail into a separate bit bucket. It wouldn’t do any good to send a return email ’cause it would just come back to me! I found what appeared to be his secretary’s email address in some of the messages. I sent her a very nice email that her boss had apparently used the wrong return address which was wreaking havoc on my inbox and that he was probably missing important messages. I got a short reply from her that she would look into it and get back to me.
The next response I received (other than a few thousand messages intended for the mayor) was a letter from the man himself. The gist of his email was, “I am the mayor a city and obviously way more important than you, so you should just hand over your gmail address to me.” I explained that I had been using that address forever and that was not going to happen. I further indicated that he needed to start telling people his correct return address immediately or I was going handle it myself.
His answer was: “I’ll just wait until you can’t stand the volume of email a town mayor receives every day and give it up.”
I sent him back a very carefully worded message detailing the fact that I had received via email intended for him:
1. A complete list of all city employees, their home addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers and their annual salaries.
2. Confidential legal correspondence concerning ongoing labor disputes, city contracts, and employee discipline issues.
3. Lots of personal stuff that he probably didn’t want published in the paper.
I pointed out that he and most of his staff could probably go to jail for sending sensitive and confidential information in open email, especially considering I had warned him about his return address “mistake” and yet he refused to correct it.
To this day, I still receive the odd email from some disgruntled citizen complaining about potholes or the neighbor’s overhanging trees, but the main bulk stopped almost instantly.
The most concerning aspect of the whole incident is that this is probably in no way an isolated case. How many city, state, and federal officials are using unencrypted “free” email accounts to handle sensitive government correspondence? (insert your Hillary email server joke here)
Gmail doesn't respect periods in email addresses, yet somehow let someone sign up with basically my address with a period in it. So I get his mail.
I've tried to contact the other person through people who are sending me his mail, but have only failed. So now I hijack any account of his which sends me mail (eg tumblr) and change the password so he can't log in. At the moment, I'm just hoping he'll think his account was hacked and he'll start fresh before I get anything more personal than his holiday photos and access to his Amazon orders.
(I also added a giant dildo to one of his orders once, hoping that would get his attention, but that didn't seem to work)
Zendesk (a popular online trouble ticket system) has a feature that creates one of these every few months due to the way it's designed. Person A submits a report and adds a Colleague A, B and C as CC recipients so they can cover during off hours or stay in the loop. A ticket is generated where each Colleague N is replaced with "Colleague N (Zendesk)" or something similar but that is only visible in certain contexts. Colleague N's email address is replaced to a Zendesk target instead of your Colleague.
So, late at night Colleague N responds to Person A to add something. Person A opens Outlook and sees the email and just hits reply to add feedback. Since Zendesk has man-in-the-middled the conversation, to try and prevent invisible conversation forks, the replies to Colleague N reach Zendesk and appear under the correct ticket number (with some exceptions --I'm still working out the whole ruleset so this may not be all that accurate).
So, once in a while long after the trouble is resolved, Person A opens Outlook and uses autocomplete to type one of the Colleague N names, neglecting to notice the appearance of at least two matches where there should only be one. They mouse over without thinking twice and select the Zendesk one, especially if the list of matches results is AND long company culture doesn't encourage uploads of personal avatars or photos for the active directory. The end result is we at the helpdesk get a new ticket with a subject and body which is confusing, and it takes a while to wonder context could warrant our involvement in the apparent request, why X reached us in error, and finally what to say while minimizing the confusion and embarrasment (I've seen people just silently close such ticket, but since Colleague N did NOT receive the message this seems unethical to me)
Both the Zendesk aliasing and the user's lazy use of autocomplete are at fault. Once in a while we've also seen our helpdesk colleagues comply with the company policy of sending a quick "Sorry I'll be late for my shift" email and fail explosively :) :)
At least this one happens during day shifts, but the issue is that their intended FYI for a group alias like "support@company.com" gets inadvertently autocompleted to something like "supportpagertrigger@company.com". An emergency ticket getd created and pagers go off to the on-call person(s). Those people are sometimes sleeping off their late evening shift till woken up at 9am for a false alarm
No joke, but there was a plastic surgeon in Texas who had the same first and last name as I. He specialized in breast augmentation. It's a while ago now, but right around the year 2000 or 2001, I got an email inquiring about his services. Apparently, the young woman writing thought I was he. I was sorely tempted to say that I would need to see what I would be working with, before I could give my "professional opinion," but my conscience got the best of me.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
I get email sometimes from the wife of a distant cousin that I don't know. They live in a part of the state I was raised in that I don't have direct family in that part of the state. Ive gotten her country club bill, her church emails, her library email and emails from dozens of her friends. I've started writing back anything that isn't mine with this statement "I'm not Anna Coward, please make sure you are sending this to the correct person" signed with my name.
This works most of the time but some of her friends are so empty headed that Ive written the above in emails back to them more than once and it seemed to be a shock when this person finally realized it wasn't Anna writing her back! (pay attention to your email much?). The straw that broke the camels back was when she put my email address on a church function website and she was the contact people were to RSVP to. I finally got a hold of the church and ask them to put the correct email address up on their website, the pastor wrote me back and ask me to please "FORWARD" all the mis-sent email to the correct address. My email back to him was less than nice as I informed him that I had a life of my own and didn't have the time to fix up his screw up.. I received more than 80 emails from that time.
It is almost like the woman doesn't know her own email address and she keeps "accidentally" giving my address out to new people she meets. It is a TOTAL pain in the backside.
I received a note from someone's interior decorator about not finishing a project, and that they would like to schedule to come back the next week. I was feeling a bit evil, so I told them that they were fired, and need not return.
Their response was surprise and remorse and asking what was the matter. I said that the work was sub-par and that someone had been messing with our lingerie.
They replied with shock and denials and I'm sure they were never more baffled and embarrassed.
Their next email was an apology for trying on the lingerie, and further apologizing for drinking our expensive wine in the kitchen too *wink wink* so I know they must have finally phoned the real client and caught on to my pranks.
Good times!
Lately I've been sent a lot of requests to work additional shifts at a sporting goods store in Idaho. I considered going, but I don't think it's really worth the hassle of a 16+ hour commute from New Zealand.
Back in early internet times, I joined AIM to talk to friends in the States. Even though it was ancient history, I couldn't get a user id approximately my name so I picked a nickname and a series of numbers, not rocket science, but it worked. A month later, (really early days for me to respond to this kind of thing), a teenager from Fort Wayne Indiana messaged me and asked how my surgery went. "I haven't seen you online for ages." Hmmm. The person she thought I was had had a brain tumor and had obviously died. Her user id recycled into the pool when I picked it up.
My namesake (work address, he used to work there) has left behind mail correspondents such as his alma mater (I've never been there, and telling them I am not him isn't working - I think it's time for another call, this time to the Dean of Alumni Relations), his former employer (what? He's gone, gone, gone, do you you know this?), many many professional contacts (most give up when I gently tell them I'm not him), and a myriad of outfits offering those sweet high-end services , products, and, yes, advice. And I am not him, don't work in the same field, or at the same level, and they are frikin annoying. Some have kept it up for 8 years, hundfrreds of messages, not the spammers, but his alma mater especially should stop.
That's just one. Another 6 from previous engagements also are the target of a steady drip of crap plainly intended to person, personally. One I had to redact to send from work, it was too personal to send, and I got back a fairly vicious threat, which when I referred to my mail team resulted in a legal response, and a warning to me to forward any further communications to legal - they apparently found the secret phrase that elicited a response. It's been a while.
Otherwise, someone used my email to avoid debt collectors, and that's a different problem. My phone number is out too, and the outfits that call it are highly annoyed that I'm highly annoyed that they keep calling me despite my evidence that I am not who they want, do not know who they want, and cannot help, but dammit I'm tired of them calling over and over, and they get angry when I point out I've told them many times, like I'm at fault. They change numbers, area codes, and it's pointless.
But welcome to technology. In the 70s I got calls from a university in a state I had never actually been in. After a few years I finally agreed to pay the library bill if they would be so kind as to send me my diploma. Never heard from them again.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
When craigslist had personal ads, you could post two different personal ads, and relay the messages between the two posters. They would eventually give each other their phone numbers, at which point you would drop out of the conversation.
Also for some reason I would get random messages from someone who mistakenly changed their email address on the okcupid site.
I don't know how but my email address has been registered as a backup address for somebody else's google account. Each time that person logs in from a mobile or a computer, I get a notification. I tried to warn that person on multiple occasions so he could unlink our accounts but nothing happened. I'm currently considering taking control of his google account seeing that I possess the recovery address.
I have a somewhat uncommon name for where I live. I'm Canadian and know of at least another 3 or 4 people across Canada with the same first and last name as myself. Canada is a very big country so it doesn't surprise me all that much. I was a very early adopter of Gmail and managed to get myfirstname.mylastname@gmail.com as my email address.
I get emails for the other people with my name, somewhat consistently. One of them has his email address as firstname/middleinitial/lastname@gmail.com (no slashes just added for legibility). Either he forgets to mention the middle initial or people forget about it. I'm not sure how I came across his real email address but at one point I did so not I just forward him his mail.
I did get one email that was meant for another of the guys with the same name as me that made me realize exactly how stupid/dangerous schools are getting with the IT practices (and I work IT so I know the dangers). So I get a random email saying that teacher X has signed up (name changed for privacy) Billy to classroom Dojo. Normally this wouldn't be an issue, but you see I have a brother and he has a son named Billy. Now Billy's teacher this year is my daughter's teacher from last year. So I'm thinking ok teacher just typed in last name and it auto selected the wrong email address. Now my daughter and my nephew both go to the same school, both my parents worked at that same school. I know most of the teachers that work there on a first name basis but I've never seen the name of this teacher who is signing up Billy for classroom dojo before in my life.
So I accept the invitation via email to be Billy's parent on classroom dojo. I then open the app and open a chat with the teacher. I find her first name and then do a quick google search to find out what I can. She is a teacher in another province all together. So I kindly explain to her that she emailed the registration email to the wrong person, that I have no affiliation with her student at all. You would think this would be enough to get things corrected... nope. I keep getting emails all year long about poor Billy's performance in class. I even called the school to let them know what a monumental mess up this was. It doesn't sound like much but think about it, I could have messaged the teacher saying hey I'm billy's dad and I'm having random stranger named Joe pick my kid up after class. Teacher would have though that I was actually that kid's dad....
So I dig in my emails some more, I remember once getting confirmation that pictures were ready from walmart... I find that email and sure enough the invoice number looks like a telephone number and the address on the invoice is around where that kid goes to school. I call the number and end up speaking with the man who has the same name as me with a son who's name is the same as my brothers son. Long story short I explain the whole situation to him and advise him that he may want to talk to the local school to make sure they try to avoid stuff like this due to the possibility of abuse.
Over time I still get emails for the rest of the guys who share my name, I've come to learn their real email addresses and forward them their emails all the time. The one that is nearest to me seems to be the one I get emails for the most. I know his name, his full address (was on an invoice for a new shed that I got), his wife's name (a quick google search let me know she is a family doctor in their community with a practive), the name of his relatives (they recently booked flights and tried to send him a copy of the itinerary which I received) and their home address....
All in all I've gotten a fair bit of emails not intended to me with enough pii in them that I can track down the location of most of the people they were intended for.
I get emails constantly for someone with the same name one province over. I've tried on multiple occasions to tell the senders, including a bank, that they have the wrong address but they keep coming. I've marked them all as spam. Not sure what else to do.
Emails at my work are formatted first.last@example.com
Sometimes my coworkers start typing and end up sending to first.last@gmail.com! Then they have the nerve to get tetchy when I don't reply. People are silly.
I keep getting someone's AT&T billing emails, etc. I contacted AT&T to have my address removed from the account, but they said I'd have to prove I was the owner in order to do that. :/
Somebody with the same name back east has been occasionally giving out my gmail address for years. He used my email address for his GameStop account. When I told GameStop, they said "If you cancel your account, you will lose all your points." Well, duh, I just told you I'm not your customer, idiot, how about contacting your actual customer and letting him know he gave the wrong email address. Or cancel his account and take away the points he's earned over his very active game-buying habit and tick him off, I don't care.
His daughter sent me several "Hey, dad, the kids at school are..." type emails. I replied with a carefully worded "Wrong email address" email.
Grocery store "customer loyalty" card. NFL fan site. (blargh) Olan Mills photography studio appointment confirmation. A FedEx delivery notification. (Yeah, FedEx delivery notification phishing is rampant, but this was a specific product to a specific address in the general area of the person. That, I printed out and snail-mailed to the address, with a "Please correct your email address on all these accounts" note.
Lately, I've gotten several Regions Bank Popmoney "Money transferred to your account" notifications. I've tried to notify Regions Bank several times, but they do not respond and the notifications keep happening.
Presumably, this guy is wondering why he's missing some important email, but I haven't figured out how to contact him.
I get a lot mis-sent mail because people forget to add the middle initial of the person they are actually trying to contact.
At first it was surprising receiving some private emails about going to church or a mens golfing group
Then it was amusing receiving another person's amazon gift card.
Then it was annoying getting confirmations for porn and box-a-month sites.
Now it is just part of life.
I regularly get eMail for a California Real Estate agent.
I've tried to get them to stop, sent messages to her, and even threatened action. No resolution. It's related to how gMail treats periods in eMail addresses.
I deal with them now via a custom "auto-delete" rule in my message app. 20 years and that's the only thing that works.
It's quite common, most days I get one or two emails meant for these four guys. Most sites are so poorly implemented that there's no way to unsubscribe or report, they just accept any email at face value.
I just ignore them.