I have a Gmail account with the format <first initial><last name>@gmail.com
So far I’ve gotten signed up for 5 or 6 different sites like a monthly statement from Bank of America for Lauren somebody, Velocity Rewards from Australia for Daryl, and Classmates.com, none of which are actually me. I’m sure they’re not spam, they’re not asking for account information or for me to buy anything, and the links in the e-mail don’t go to a fake site.
So how to correct the problem? You can’t reply to the automated e-mails they send, and trying to get through to customer service usually brings you to a form wanting your password, account number, or something like that. No help there. It would be nice to let somebody know that I’m getting the wrong e-mails, but I’ve did everything I know how to do short of getting on the phone and trying to call someone.
I don’t get many, but I’m guessing that someone gets mine.
My default email address is similar to yours - firstname.lastname@gmail.com. Problem is, my first name is a common name with an uncommon spelling (not my fault, my parents did it).
I’m very careful to spell it out when I give people my email address, and I make a point to say “it’s an uncommon spelling, please double check that you got it right.” Nevertheless, people get it wrong all the time. And there’s someone out there with that email address.
I’ve thought about writing to her and offering to buy that address, but I’m just too lazy. I’m hoping that not too much crazy stuff goes her way - I know for a while my SEP statements were going to her, but they don’t give out the full account # or anything else private.
I have a relatively common name and I get mail daily on my work account for someone who is no longer with the company. Someone in IT just decided his aliases would be OK to put under my account.
Worst part is he registered for all this mail and added their domains to the companies safe senders lists so I can’t mark them as spam. Each and every one I have to contact the company directly and ask them to remove my name, for every alias on my account.
My wife has a gmail account with an address very similar to someone from Portugal. Unfortunately, this person in Portugal keeps giving people my wife’s email address (either by accident or she’s giving it out to people she doesn’t really want to talk to – who knows?). For a while, my wife had taken to using translators to try to respond to these poor folks and ask them to tell their friend that she was screwing up, but mostly to no avail. She doesn’t bother responding anymore.
Someone signed up for MySpace with one of my email accounts. I don’t know how that happened, especially since they send you an email with a link to confirm that the email address is valid. I tried to look at the guy’s profile one time, but it was private (and probably hadn’t been confirmed yet anyway). I still get the MySpace newsletters to that account. When I signed up for MySpace months or years later, I had to use a different email address because that one was already being used by another account.
The MySpace ones go to a Hotmail account I set up especially to handle internet-based stuff. What’s been really strange is that I get an email a couple of times a year to my university account for a person with the same last name as me. They’re sent by a fraternity and addressed to <hisname lastname>, but with my email (<mynamelastname>) in brackets behind. Our first names aren’t similar - for one thing, he’s a guy and I have an obviously feminine first name. I have no idea how my email address got attached to his name and how no one has noticed the discrepancy. I might have emailed back the first time it happened, but never got a response.
I have the same real-life name as a famous bicycle racer. He apparently has a very similar gmail account to mine, because I’m constantly getting cycling newsletters, random missives from sports reporters, etc. I used to get maybe one or two of these a month. Then he went to the Olympics ( :eek: ) Now I get one a week or so.
One time, I even got one from his mom. That was one of the rare occasions when I broke my silence and replied, so she could send it to the right address. (I actually don’t know what the right address is, other than it must be one dot or number or something away from mine.)
Even if you sign up for a mailbox no one has ever used, you will still get junk email. There are spam generators that create addresses from either random characters or go thru the entire character list. They’re bound to hit you sometime, and if it doesn’t get bounced, they now know it exists, so it goes into their “good” list which they hit more often or sell to others.
For example, generate all possible addresses at a domain (and domains can be looked up), starting at “a@”, then “b@”, etc., until you start again at “aa@”, “ba@”, etc., and don’t forget numbers and other symbols.
I just get a few from my department, which is quite large. Sometimes the dept. head or secretary will send out a message to everyone in the dept., and when someone replies, they end up replying to…well, everyone, instead of to the person who sent it.
All the time. I was one of the first to sign on to AOL way back. My screen name is <first initial><lastname>@aol.com
I get loads of emails for others. If it isn’t spam I always send a courteous: I’m sorry, you have an incorrect email address. Good luck finding the correct one.
I’ve received various “your account has been activated” type e-mails with attached passwords… mostly travel related. For a while I received weekly progress reports for a biomedical research team. I’ve been sent internal newsletters about a hospital association in Australia. I received bar crawl itineraries for a mutual fund management group. I had one of the owners of swapnotes ask my opinion on whether he should go do some hand-holding for some prospective investors. Most recently I’ve been getting mail from what appears to be a Swedish exchange student sending out “9/11 truth” to his friends.
I get a lot for a person with a similar name. The best so far:
Forwarded anti-Obama material of the expected sort (He’s a Muslim socialist!) With a link to a Freeper thread. Sent from a work email address.
A reminder from the boss of her company that “we’re a fashion store guise so dress the part !!11oneone”
Her mortgage paperwork in PDF form, sent by the broker
Plus various emails from this individual’s club at university. So far I haven’t used my powers for evil. I did give up replying to people and telling them they have the wrong person. For whatever reason, my email gets disseminated among this person’s relatively large network of acquaintances and colleagues (more than one email has started, “I got your email from X, gosh it’s been a long time!”)