Incorrectly addressed email fun

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I was round at my dads earlier and he showed me an email he’d just received. It contained the risk assessment, travel and security plans for an imminent Major US News Network trip to a current war-zone. It seems the cameraman on the trip has the same name as the one my dad uses for his gmail address, and there’s been a mixup somewhere. I’m guessing the cameraman is a freelancer, as most of the others on the distribution list have MajorUSNewsNetwork.com addresses, including the quite famous and glamorous correspondent.

It was a fascinating (if slightly guilty) read, now thoroughly deleted, and I let the original sender know about the error.

Anyone else accidentally received something interesting in their inbox?

2

An acquaintance of mine has a sibling with my first name. I once received an email clearly meant for her sibling with all their mother’s bank information, account numbers, routing numbers to facilitate a deposit being made into their mother’s account.

I immediately deleted it and cleared my trash and let her know it came to me and that I destroyed it without really looking at it.

3

A friend of mine has his e-mail address as his full name.

Somewhere out there, there’s another person with the same name, who for some reason, thinks they also have that e-mail address, and puts it down on all sorts of forms, causing my friend to get a slew of notifications, updates, etc., from various third parties.

Initially, my friend tried to correct it, by telling the people that they need to contact the intended recipient and let him know that he is using the wrong e-mail address. However, as it kept occurring, he now thinks of creative responses - his wife is in jail, they are taking a month-long mission trip to England, etc.

4

I have a common name and work at a big company with an unimaginative system for assigning email addresses. Better still, I was the first employee of my name they came to when they instituted that system, so I got the simple version. (Everyone else has their middle initial added to the address.) As a result, my address pops up first when someone is looking for one of us. Right now, there are only three of us, but at one point, there were over a dozen worldwide. I’ve gotten lots of other people’s emails.

However, since it’s a company email address, most of it has been pretty boring, totally cryptic, or both. The system did once get it into its head to email me all faxes related to a lawsuit the Australian division was involved in; that was kind of interesting at first, but quickly became a forward-and-delete nuisance.

Obviously, one of my namesakes needs to get transferred into a more interesting job.

5

Someone in Australia with my name has a hotmail account close enough to mine that I was getting all kinds of stuff for her, plus her junk email. I quit using that account some years back - I got tired of dealing with the mess. I don’t have those problems with the accounts using my username.

6

I used to have a work email address similar to one of the maintenance guys who worked at a different facility in another state. So I’d occasionally get emails about light bulbs needing to be replaced or the A/C not working or whatever. I think people would just type the first two or three letters and select the wrong name that came up in autocomplete.

7

I have a (first initial)(last name)@gmail.com address. And I’ve got a very uncommon last name: growing up in the DC area back when practically everyone was in the phone book, there were maybe 6-8 families in the entire area (DC, MD and VA 'burbs combined) with our last name.

But I’ve managed to acquire an extensive list of people with same first initial and last name who have apparently given out my email as their own. I’ve even gotten things like apartment rental agreements and credit card info (which I’ve deleted) on some of these folks.

8

I have my first name@gmail.com so worldwide I get lots of emails meant for other people. Some are bills, others bank statements. I have set a particular country’s extension to go straight to junk because I was getting a lot of sign ups. I think people don’t care even when I try and correct it.

9

We had an employee who was carrying on a torrid affair with a woman in Canada, apparently with her husband’s knowledge. He went up to visit her and wear out a mattress a couple of times a year. In between, they exchanged lurid emails, for which he used his work address.

Somewhere, she had a bogus username for him that she occasionally used only while drunk and very horny. Bogus emails went to the catchall to be reviewed by the IT manager. The IT manager ahurm and company owner greatly enjoyed reading these emails.

10

There’s a man, a lawyer apparently, with a large and loving family.
He has passed out my email address to them for over a decade.

I mean, same last name, same initials, but despite many polite responses to this family, the email error continues. I’ve asked people to tell him that he’s sending out the wrong address.

I have not been mean. During his brother’s wedding, I did not tell his relatives that I would be happy to pick them up at the airport. I contacted his cousin and told him he was sending pictures of his babies to a complete stranger. But, Every time I think it’s gone, I get another.

Then last month I got an email from a state agency about some kind of registration. I contacted them, and they sent me an email telling me I had given them the wrong email address.

11

conversely, we had a .com.au email address, and clients would occasionaly forget the .au and send mail to some other character with just the .com address.

And what we would get in our email was cranky notes from some cranky character on the other side of the world angry at us because some other person had accidently used the wrong mail address.

12

We have an old friend named “Bob White” - his real name is as common as that. He’s getting on in years, and the last time my husband and I saw him, about a year ago, we commented that he was not as sharp as he used to be, and a little bit old-person-cranky.

A couple of weeks ago, a bunch of people from a now-defunct organisation (with which Bob White and my husband had both been affiliated) decided to have a reunion. They sent a mass email to all invitees, including my husband and Bob White.

A number of responses ensued, many of which did not need to be broadcast to everyone, but in such situations people do have a tendency to overuse the “reply to all” function. Thus, many related e-mails filled the inboxes of all invitees.

Then Bob White sent an unexpectedly nasty note to everyone which said something like “stop cc’ing me on all your damn e-mails! Take me off the list!”

My husband showed it to me and said, “uh oh, poor Bob is really losing it.” We felt sad, but not shocked.

The email address Bob was using was different from the one my husband had for him, so my husband sent Bob a note at the new address saying “hey, has your e-mail changed? Is this the right email address to use for you now?” He signed the note, and my husband does NOT have a common name at all.

Bob responded, just as surly as earlier, saying “of COURSE this is my email address.”

Anyway … it turns out the emails were all going to the wrong Bob White. It finally got straightened out, and I’m happy to say that “our” Bob White#1 is fine, and not descending into the dementia-influenced grumpiness suggested by Bob White #2’s communications.

I think Bob White #2 has a problem, though.

13

Can you guys please stop posing your stories with two or three lines in the beginning to explain how or why you got to receive the messages by mistake?

Just go ahead and tell us what you got.

I personally received a couple of boring emails from a company I used to do freelance work for. I read every last bit of them and I’ll use the information for leverage at some point in the future.

14

So she answered, “No, in the third drawer.” God, we laughed for days.

15

One morning I found 20-30 emails from a bunch of mortgage brokers, discussing some guy’s mortgage application, complete with credit details, income, etc. etc. Apparently the first guy in the chain mistyped a colleague’s email address, and everyone else just kept hitting “Reply to All”. I emailed them all to let them know I wasn’t who they they thought, and the originator of the email thread started arguing with me - “Come on Larry, we know it’s you! Stop horsing around!” After 2-3 iterations of me telling them I wasn’t Larry and maybe they should call him, or at least stop sending some customer’s confidential info until they confirmed the email addresses, the emails suddenly stopped.

16

Not long ago I received a very stern, angry email from my former professor demanding that I return some property he’d lent to me. Turns out he’d meant to send it to another person whose name was different from mine by one letter. He was very apologetic when I informed him of the mistake.

The most bizarre mistaken email I ever received was from twenty years ago, some kind of intra-hospital email which wasn’t similar to mine at all, but somehow it wound up in my inbox anyway. The text read something like: “100mg of this medication is way too much for this patient – please reduce the dose to 25mg immediately.” Always wondered what happened with that…

17

One of my ISP account usernames (which I use only for master-level accounts, never for communication) must have been one letter different from some poor slob who was trying to change some international airline reservations in a hurry. I got a whole flurry of emails from his increasingly frantic travel agent. Sure hope he’s made it back from Instanbul or wherever by now…

18

My Gmail address is a first initial, full last name @gmail.com. My last name isn’t very common but there are at least 2 of us in the US with the same first and last name, even the same age. They seem like nice people and are probably distant relatives.

I did not think Gmail would allow two different people to register the same exact email address but apparently the other guy entered his in ALL CAPS and mine is lower case. Most people entering email addresses do so in lower case and some email programs must just convert the caps to lower case, I don’t know.

But it seems that Gmail allows alastname@gmail.com and ALASTNAME@GMAIL.COM.

Anyway I get some of their emails. I have had to tell their car dealer’s service department to quit sending me appointment reminders or I will start scheduling service appointments that no one will show up for and that I wouldn’t be caught dead driving a Honda. They seem to have stopped.

The latest one was from a legitimate business sales rep trying to reach his client about some road signs. I took mercy and told him I was at least a thousand miles away and not his client, he responded and thanked me.

19

He ded

20

That’s odd. The Simple Mail Transport Protocol allows for case sensitivity to the left of the “@” (not in the domain part to the right though), but I’ve never seen a mail system that actually is implemented that way. Gmail certainly isn’t.