There are apparently a lot of people out there with my first initial and the same few first letters in their last name, because I keep getting e-mail intended for them. I have told people about this, but it keeps coming anyway. So I get
–dirty jokes intended for somebody in Vermont
–Casino perks for Connecticut casinos I’ve never been to
–Promotionasl literature telling me what a great Michigan governor Rick Snyder is
The dirty jokes have stopped coming, but the other stuff is generated by internet bots, so it doesn’t seem wort the trouble. And I’m curious to see how pro-Snyder people view their gov.
My e-mail is firstInitialLastName@email.com. I get one or two e-mails a week for other people with my last name and first initial. I have two people, one from the UK and one from Australia, who sign up for all sorts of stuff using my e-mail.
The one from the UK and has to do some sort of truck emissions testing regularly, he signed up with my e-mail address. The one from Australia travels and shops a lot.
I also get a lot of junior sports e-mails from somewhere around the Pennsylvania area.
Oh, and I’ve gotten various documents regarding shooting schedules/details for the Hunger Games movies in the Georgia area, IIRC.
If it was just once in a while, I’d probably just delete them but if it was happening a lot, I’d be tempted to reset their password, not to anything, just go to the website, hit the ‘Forgot my password’ button and delete the email that it generates. They won’t be able to log in next time and depending on how the ‘reset my password’ protocol is set up, they might not be able to (re)reset their password with out having access to their email, which means they would have to put a new email address on file.
Come to think of it, that would be hard to do without access to the account, but that’s their problem, it might force them to call in and then maybe they’ll update their email address.
This happens to me, on occasion. I got Gmail in 2004, when it was still invite-only (the sister of a close friend worked for GOOG), so I got [myfirstname].[mylastname]@gmail.com–no qualifying digits or any other cruft. While my name is not “John Smith”-common (or even “Rick Smith”-common), it’s also not particularly unusual.
I have gotten mail for someone with my name
in NJ with a daughter in a competitive youth soccer league (I think he also owns a Honda, since I get email from a Honda dealer in NJ).
in Washington state who works for Nike (cc’ed to his work email)
in SoCal who is real estate agent (legal documents, offer letters, proposals, etc)
in Hawaii who is also in real estate (might be the same one, but I don’t think so)
in Rochester NY for whom I got a confirmation email on some upcoming travel reservations
(One of those guys also sits on a couple of non-profit boards and participates in an annual charity golf tourney, though I can’t remember which.)
In most cases, if the mail is personal (esp. legal documents), I will respond to the sender letting them know they have the wrong address and to check with the intended recipient. I usually get grateful responses, and a promise not to do it again (though it occasionally does). In the case of the guy with the travel plans, the email included his contact phone, so I called him to get the right address to forward the confirmation (since it was from a no-reply address). We had a nice chat, since the travel he was planning was to a place I had just been a couple of weeks before.
I have 3 people who think my email address is theirs, one in Helena Montana, one in the UK, and two in australia.
I’ve gotten
dental appointment reminders
a job offer for a doctor position in a hospital
a $30,000 home furnishing / remodel receipt
a certification documenting a license to sell alchohol in the UK
a profinity laced diatribe from a father to a son about the sons lack of ambition towards getting a job (both working in the offshore oil rig industry
lots of dirty jokes and gross / funny pictures
I own a couple of three-letter .org.uk domains. One is my initials; the other my father’s. I have the same initials as a major UK qualification; my father’s initials are an easy typo for a major UK charity. Hilarity often ensues.
Indeed. My wife has an extremely unusual family name. If you put it into Google, you’ll basically only get descendants of her paternal grandfather (and some wives of the males). I bought her eponymous domain about 6 months ago. Mine’s been unavailable for at least a decade.
Now that one would have been fun to reply to. “Bite me dad, I’ve got something all lined up. Can I just borrow some money for a few more weeks until this guy calls me back?”
My parent’s phone number is a digit or two off from a funeral home so they occasionally get late night calls from people who just lost a close family member. You always have to remember that even though they get the calls on a regular basis, the person doing the dialing is only misdialing for (hopefully) the first time. Having said that, it might be tempting to say “No problem, we’ll be right there [click]” No that I would ever do that.
I have one gmail account for spam and unimportant crap that I didn’t want in my other emails. It’s just a completely random word like “bottle.”
Turns out there’s a lot of bottles out there and I have always gotten mail for various people with that name, a few Bob Ottles, people named Bottler, Bottie etc. I used to reply or google their name for their real address and try to help them get to the right place, but I never got a response so now I just delete them.
The repeat offenders are:
I get emails from a woman named Fran that are always photos of family reunions or keeping the family up to date on what the rest of the family is up to…
I get signup emails for sex sites for one guy, including a short cell phone video of him jerking off in the mirror that I guess he was trying to send to himself. I mean, that’s what I do with my jerk off videos anyway.
The most interesting is the one guy who gets emails related to multi-million dollar building contracts in the middle east. I can tell he’s pretty important. I can only imagine how many extravagant buildings in Qatar have not been built because I delete the emails meant for him.
I’ve developed a good understanding with my gmail doppleganger, and we exchange incorrect e-mail all the time. That guy trusts me with his real estate contracts, the least I can do is trust that he’ll forward on that professional reference I’m expecting. Hell - that guy knew I was getting married before any of my close friends did!
I’ve got [first name][last initial]@me.com. My first name’s uncommon and so were (back then) people with me.com domain email addresses, so for a long time, I didn’t have this problem.
I’ve since acquired three different parties who think this email address is theirs.
The first one was a lady in the Midwest who signed me up for Athleta.com emails and had elderly-sounding relatives sending things like recipes, personal contact info, and family updates.
The second seems to be a father sending emails to his college-age kids. He also sends private updates, but also things like travel itineraries with PDFs and other attachments with information I’m sure he’d rather keep in the family.
The third person must be Swedish because every day now I receive at least 3 emails in Swedish from various Swedish online retailers.
I used to reply to people that they had the wrong email address, but not anymore. It’s faster to just delete whatever isn’t obviously intended for me.
There’s a British fellow who has the same email address as one of my cousins, except one is at gmail and one at hotmail (or something).
Every once in a while, someone in the family tries to email everyone, and just goes to find an old email that we were all on and replies-all. The old email has the wrong address, unfortunately. Then others start replying-all. Then the British fellow has to point out that he’s not part of our family, and please to update our address books.
This has happened three times now. I expect it will happen on and off forever. He seems to have a fairly good sense of humor about it. Sorry, British guy.
I get a lot of that same thing. Unfortunately, my name is very common. In addition to the email doppleganger I mentioned above, there are a number of other lesser facsimiles of us out there who have failed to educate their people on what their correct email address is. One family in particular likes to send out picnic announcements, and have people sign up for what items they’re going to bring. I like to sign my “other” up for steaks, followed by a quick “just kidding - you guys still keep sending me these things and should probably track him down for the correct address” notes.
A former coworker of mine worked at AOL in the early days, and ended up with <his three letter first name>@aol.com as his personal email address. He said he got an astonishing amount of mail intended for other people.
It’s astounding what people will send out to strangers. I just got another flight itinerary sent to me. Someone with my first name and last initial is flying from Omaha to Chicago, where they’ll then depart for Frankfurt, then Geneva, and finally Munich. They’ll be gone October 7th through the 17th. I know which airlines they’re flying, their flight and seat numbers, their frequent flyer account number, the last 4 digits of their VISA card, and that the Chicago-Frankfurt flight serves dinner. I can also check in for her.
I ran two very simple Google search queries on the sender and intended recipient, and now I know the city they live in, their employers and current positions, and their work email addresses. Based on their greetings and sign-offs, I know how they’re related to one another.
I feel like I’m just a few questionable morals away from causing serious disruptions in their lives. Email deleted.
I don’t get anyone else’s email on my personal accounts, because I deliberately pick oddball addresses. (It’s not like my real name is available anywhere, anyway). At work, however, I consistently get email and, lately, chat messages meant for any of several other guys who share my first and last names. Usually boring stuff, but at one point, I got a flurry of faxes in my email regarding some legal wrangling intended for one of my namesakes in Australia.
I get updates about someone’s kid’s soccer games and their QVC shopping among other things. If its a real person emailing I try to reply back, but mostly just delete. I was able to change the login info on the QVC account but didn’t actually reroute the packages…yet.