Mine is FirstInitialLastName@aol.com. I get email for other people all the time. I am always very polite and just say: I’m sorry, you have an incorrect email address. Good luck finding the correct one.
I’ve had some real doozies. One guy wrote back: If it was incorrect, then how did you get it. Gotcha!
One girl kept copying me on all her emails, no matter how many times I asked her to stop. Finally, one day she wrote to her parents to say that she couldn’t make it home because she had a test and then wrote to her friends to say she would be at their kegger. I narced on her and she went nuts on me. But she stopped copying me on her emails.
But most of the time people are happy that I let them know.
I signed up for a .mac account nearly a decade ago, and since then have had a FirstnameLastinitial at mac.com email address. I used it throughout college and my family sends me email there.
This spring, a lady in Ohio (I Googled her), with the same first name and last initial, fell under the impression that this email address was hers. She began shopping online and giving the address out to friends and family. She signed up for newsletters and bought Farmville credits.
There was no real reason to, but to be safe, I changed the account password. Then I replied to one of her friend’s emails, asking her to inform the intended recipient the email account wasn’t hers. That didn’t stop her boyfriend from sending me what appears to be pictures of himself (with html file extensions…), though. I figured that was the general level of computer savvy I was dealing with; thankfully her friend didn’t try to inform her of the problem via email.
I’ve been saving her personal stuff in a folder and deleting the spam. If she wants any of it, she knows how to reach me.
I just hope he isn’t doing what I do: I’ve given out emails of notmy@email.com, a way of communicating that it’s not my real email, while still getting past the filters.
Granted, since I now have a throwaway account, I don’t do that as often. Just with addresses and phone numbers (555)555-5555 is pretty obviously fake.
I’ve had this problem with my email which is firstname@gmail. So some girls in another country keeps using it. I get all sorts of work emails and invoices. Even once she booked her flight with it. Over the years I’ve tried to reply all and get her or her friends to realize she’s using the wrong address. Now I just send all email with the country extension to the spam folder.
My gmail account is firstname@gmail.com. I started getting emails asking me to come and sing for various functions. They were all in California. I’m in Mississippi. It was obvious that the person they were asking for in the emails is an operatic soprano, and I’m an alto who used to sing in the church choir. I have a very unusual first name, so it was easy to find out who these emails were supposed to go to: her account is firstnamefirstinitialoflastname@gmail.com. So I contacted her and was able to forward her email so she wouldn’t miss out on a performance opportunity. She’s an extremely nice person, and very talented. Her MySpace page has clips of her singing.
I started with AOL VERY early - and as a consequence, my email address is basically firstnamelastname@aol.com, with no numbers, letters, or other characters - both first name and last name being VERY common (think along the lines of Jane Doe or John Smith). I get mail intended for other people on at least a weekly basis. Apparently, there’s a church directory somewhere in the Dallas/Richardson area that lists MY email address incorrectly for one of their more active churchlady members whose name is the same as mine. I get invitations to card games (what is bunco, anyway?), church events, prayer circles, meetings to purchase time shares, and more. I’ve got a form letter I usually send back which basically says ‘your email reached the wrong party, please check with your friend to get their correct email address so strangers like me don’t read your private stuff’.
It works for a while until someone starts it all up again with forwards and ‘reply to all’.
And I also get someone’s facebook notifications, and email from my ‘private shopper’ at Saks, and tons of other stuff I never signed up for. There’s another ‘Jane Doe’ out there who doesn’t know her own email addy who seems to be seperate from the Texas Jane Doe.