Okay so if i am reading this correctly, he is saying some people will just enter an e-mail address they never set up just because it is their own first letter and last name and assume it is their own e-mail? So Mr. John Smith will enter jsmith @ gmail.com on a form even though he never set up that address for himself because that’s his name. Really? Does that really happen?
I get that people don’t understand computers but…really?
Or maybe I just don’t get what he is saying in the comic.
When I did support, our on-line form had the light text ‘name@example.com’ in the box.
Sure enough. morons would fill in ‘Sally @ example.com’ and then call us complaining that they weren’t getting an email response. :rolleyes:
Didn’t happen a lot, but it did happen. Tons and tons of non-existent Yahoo emails too. “Oh yeah, I put down my email as ‘bob @ yahoo.com’. I wonder why I did that! My email address is 'dick69 @ yahoo.com. Must have been because your thing said ‘name’ @ example.com. You guys should fix that!”
Some site insists that it needs your email address, and you’ve already given them your name. So, if you combine your first initial with your last name(especially if you have a semi-common name)@gmail.com and it should connect up with somebody’s email address more than 1/2 the time. The email address doesn’t bounce and you’re cleared to post on that site…until the poor schlub with that email address contacts that site to find out why they keep sending him stuff.
I have an email address that I set up back in 1996, when I knew very little about the web, that doesn’t follow that format, but a similar one, although I used the name of a deceased relative rather than my own name. Years later, I wanted to buy something from an online store, and couldn’t remember if I’d shopped there before, so I put in that old username. Sure enough, it was recognized, although I couldn’t remember the password. The password hint was “use at school”. I knew instantly that the password was “pencil”, although I couldn’t remember ever being naive enough to use that as a password/password hint. Sure enough, when I entered “pencil”, I got the complete online store records for some random woman.
I took it to mean that they just forget that their email address is really john.smith1 instead of john.smith. But looking back, I guess the other way does fit the comic better.
I would love to know who has the same name I do, when I tried to make myself an email for Gmail, I tried aruvqan.smith, aruvqanIsmith, AIsmith, aruvqanisabelsmith, aIsabelsmith and damned if there isn’t someone out there with my whole real name apparently registered on gmail [which Isabel is the only part that is part of my non-nickname name] then I tried it with mrAru’s surname, and damned if none of those are available either.
Look, I know for a damned fact I have my first name and middle name and last name as the only members of my living family in the US and I am pretty damned sure from vanity google I am the only one in the world with my combination of first and last name [it is an unusual surname, and my first name is not a normal familial line name, and there are under 1000 of us in the world currently]
I have been tempted to email the address and see what pops up.
I’m reminded of this story. Apparently there is a whole stream of people whose method of getting to Facebook is going to Google, typing “Facebook Login”, and hoping the “I’m feeling lucky” link is the Facebook login screen. Some story on readwriteweb.com, for a brief moment, was the top result for that search (the story was about Facebook and logging in) and its comment section got flooded with people thinking that it was some radical redesign of Facebook and complaining about it.
The moral is that there are a bunch of people who use the internet in a state of complete incomprehension of how it all works. Given that, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are plenty of people who imagine that <initial><lastname>@gmail.com has been assigned to them despite them never having signed up for it.
I suspect the real issue is people trying to remembering an email address, but getting the domain name confused. So jsmith@gmail ends up with a bunch of email intended for jsmith@yahoo, etc.
You know, I’ve been lucky, my entire life I’m the only person on the planet with my particular first/last name combo. Then come to find a couple of years back there’s now a kid in another state with my name. May have to hunt him down and kill him or something. Can’t imagine what it must be like to be named Bob Johnson or Mike Smith.
When I first signed up for AIM, I remember going through every combination of my fairly unusual name, and having them all taken. Then I stated going down the ingrediants list on the Mountain Dew can I had on my desk and those were all taken to!.
If a popular service is more then a few years old, its almost impossible to get a screen name without resorting to using numbers.
There’s a teenager out there with the same name as my wife that signed up for some social network site. While doing so she just assumed that her email address was <firstname><lastname>@<domain>.com. Unfortunately for her, that’s been my wife’s email address for many years. The girl was not happy when the account was closed.
Me, I’ve got an unusual enough last name that I’ll probably never get to deal with this first hand.
I read down in that blog or whatever it is, until I got to the first posting about Idiot Bill Bickel. Clearly the guy is completely clueless about email and the internet and everything. In that earliest post, the reason pops out:
He is a real estate agent. From personal experience, largely the dumbest segment of humanity I have ever encountered. Except for the one I used, who was awesome.
Roddy
My personal e-mail is also firstinitial_lastname@domain.
I get all kinds of misdirected mail. For instance, I got an internal claim report from a car insurance company, suggesting that it was a good settlement. I nicely wrote back suggesting that they have the wrong person, they need to check the e-mail of the intended recipient, and that I didn’t open the attachment.
I’ve also been copied on e-mail aliases for being a jurist in an art exposition.
My address is firstname.lastname@gmai.com, but fortunately my last name is fairly rare in the US, and so far as I know I’m the only person in the country with my first and last name. I think there might be another one in Germany, though.
It’s totally believable that there would be people who thought that way. Remember it wasn’t very many years ago that your main e-mail address would often be one assigned to you by your internet provider. Those were often assigned addresses that had the customer’s name as part of the address. The customer didn’t choose it, they just got it.
I’m sure there are enough people who are clueless enough that they think that works for all internet address domains.
Sadly, my name is a female name as common as John Smith. I have never had an e-mail address that had anything to do with my name. I did however make up a word many years ago (I think it’s been 12 years or so) and it’s always available. No emails with numbers for me.
Sometime ago, about 80% of the spam and phishing emails I got came from “envy.nu”. So after a while, whenever some web page that I followed a link to so I could read some article that interested me required me to enter an email address, I’d just enter “joeblow@envy.nu”.
I got one of those, but luckily earthlink packages 10 email addresses into the one account, plus 5 anonymous-ized sort of random letter email addresses to be used if you don’t want to use your regular one to subscribe to something. I use one of those as a throwaway for registering to stuff like New York Times. So I have my real name+number addy that is used for business stuff [bank statements, e-bills from utilities stuff like job applications], one I use in general if I don’t mind spammers possibly getting it, one anonymous-mini me. Then mrAru has one email and one anonymoused, our roomie has one regular and one anonymoused. Then we all have gmail for the storage space, I have a German GMX one for gaming. Hell, I might still have an ancient Juno one lurking for all I know. :smack:
My gmail address follows that format, but what happens most of the time is that people misspell my first name (which is a moderately common name, but a not-so-common spelling) and my email goes to the person who has my name spelled with the correct spelling. As far as I know, I’ve never gotten any of her email.
However, I have a gmail address that’s my first initial + maiden name, and boy oh boy, do I ever get the wrong mails there, almost always for the same handful of people. I rarely use that address, so I set up an autoresponse that was only about 20% snarky, saying something along the lines of:
“You’ve reached Jane Doe’s email address. If you were trying to reach John Doe, James Doe, Jill Dough, or Mr. Jackson Doeman, you have the wrong address. I can’t forward your mail to any of those people, so I suggest you give them a call and get their correct email address. Also, if you wouldn’t mind, please tell them that their email address is NOT jdoe@gmail.com, because I’m sick of getting their emails.”
It’s actually really cut down on the wrong emails I get, so yay me!
