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 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.
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.
Whoever owns @test.com must earn a lot of money from selling all the information that goes to their catch-all inbox.
I have a similar gmail account name, I got in earrly and got a good one, and I've not only received some juicy emails intended for other "me's", I've been threatened with legal action for receiving them. One guy has also demanded I turn over my account to him, as he is entitled to it, and threatened to sue me if I didn't. Haven't heard anything about that one in a few years.
The most annoying part are the companies who get your address added as a point of contact for something and never accept it was never intended to be you. I got so pissed off with one of my alter egos who refused to fix his mistake, even blaming me for receiving the emails and threatening me, that I cancelled his business broadband...
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 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..
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.
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.
RRRRRRING!!!!!
(I pick up the phone)
— Hi! Can I speak to your sister?
— Sure (hands the phone to my sister who was passing by).
They talk for 30 minutes, then realize it was a wrong number
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.
Ugh. Landlines.
Back before ubiquitous cellphones and number portability and when moving to a new town meant getting a new local number that might have belonged to someone else in the past...
I had just moved towns and gotten a new number for my new place. Turned out MY new phone number had used to belong to someone who'd skipped out on some bills. Which, of course, meant that the debt collectors, scummy and dimwitted creatures that they are, started harassing ME. No amount of: first, semi-courteously correcting their screwup; then, telling them unequivocally to stop calling me; then, telling them to go fuck themselves in increasingly creative ways; and eventually, blowing the loudest and most shrill whistle I could find into the phone; would get them to knock off the crap. Eventually, I wound up having to play along long enough to find out where they were located; and start calling their local police and sheriffs' offices and reporting them repeatedly for harassment. Even then, it didn't stop entirely. But it brought the number down to a level that I didn't have to get a new phone number.
Imagine all the people...