I once received a passionate love note intended for someone else. It began “Honey”, so I wasn’t clued in that is wasn’t for me until near the end when the writer mentioned the person’s name. For a few beautiful paragraphs, I thought my scientist husband had become an eloquently romantic lover and I was thrilled to death.
Imagine my disappointment when I read “I love you, dearest Lisa,…” in the last paragraph.
It must have been a small typo in the address, though, as I never received another one. (Either that or dearest Lisa broke up with the guy!)
For a couple of years the VP of my department had the same last name as mine. During a period of huge restructuring in the company I was fascinated to see some of the output from the senior leadership planning forums sent to me by mistake. Layoff head count targets by functional manager was probably the best - I could have sold that and retired on the beach. Of course if I’d done that, the head count target for my group would have been increased by one, so I just forwarded the messages to the correct recipient and let him get all medieval on the asses of the senders.
A friend of mine at one time was receiving “fan”
e-mail intended for the columnist Michelle Malkin. My friend’s politics, it should be noted, are quite opposite to Ms. Malkin’s.
I have my lastname@gmail.com. My last name is pretty rare in the States, but I have what must be very distant family scattered through out South America. As a result, I get stuff that is intended for various distant relatives. I was getting financials for a golf course to be built in Columbia. I was getting copied on emails for the attorneys setting up the limited liability company in Panama to own and operate said golf course and copies of the corporate charters. I replied a few times and told the forwarder that I wasn’t Renata, and to check his email address. He never did, so it all gets automatically sorted to a folder in my gmail account.
I’ve also gotten electrical invoices from the south of Brazil, notes from a planning commission in southeastern Brazil, and other random assorted crap. The funniest one is that one of them put my email address as the backup for his own account.
I used to own a domain, let’s call it something dot org.
Someone else owned something dot com.
My ISP had set up the account so that anything coming to an unknown address at my dot-org domain, got forwarded to the administrator (me).
So every now and then, I’d get an email addressed to someoneunknown at something dot org, that was clearlyt intended for someoneonknown at something dot com.
I would usually just reply to the sender along the lines of “Sorry, you put the wrong domain, you need to email this person at something dot com, not dot org”.
Then one day, I got the same email from the same dumb person, 3 times - finally saying “I don’t know why I keep getting this reply, what’s going on with your email???”.
Um, lady, ya think maybe it’s because it KEEPS HAPPENING and you KEEP IGNORING WHAT I’M SAYING and you CAN’T BE BOTHERED TO FIX THE ADDRESS YOU’RE SENDING IT TO??? :rolleyes:
I finally emailed the people at the dot com address, and suggested they remind their clients that they were dot com not dot org. I got a reply saying “sorry, we’ll definitely remind them”.
Oh - and not email but my work phone is designed so that it works both as a phone and a fax (the fax contents are emailed to me). At a former location, I kept getting faxes with people’s medical information. Um, what?
Finally on one form, I saw the problem. If my phone number was 801-555-1212, the desired fax was 802-555-1212. Area code off by one digit.
If the sender had a phone number, I’d call them and let them know (and of course deleted the fax). One time though, I got a second and/or third fax with a handwritten note saying “Tried to send this 3 times already!”.
Durrrrrr… if it hasn’t gone through that many times, maybe you oughta call the recipient and verify their fax number?