My email address is my first initial and last name, like jsmith. My name is apparently more popular than I thought, almost daily I get email from organizations that is not for me. They are often from other states and other countries, especially UK and Australia.
Often these emails have an Unsubscribe button, I will hit that for a couple emails but if they keep sending me emails I will click Report Spam.
It’s the ones that don’t have an Unsubscribe button that confound me. A lot of them prompt me to log in to change my account details, but it’s not my account and I don’t want to reset someone’s account password just so I can get my email address out of it.
So I click Report Spam in Gmail, because while I sympathize with the intended recipient not getting their email, I don’t very sympathize with organizations that don’t use an opt-in system for email addresses.
Many years ago, I had a domain registered to me - something dot org. Any emails sent to an unknown address at that domain got forwarded to me.
Well, there was a business that had something dot com. And occasionally I’d get emails for that domain by mistake - e.g. if johndoe @ something dot com was accidentally sent to johndoe @ something dot org. I’d usually reply to the sender, letting him/her know.
Until one clueless person kept sending me messages, and ignoring my reply to her. Finally I got one that said “I don’t know what’s going on. I keep emailing you and getting THIS (a cc of my reply) back!!”.
Well duh, lady, maybe you ought to read the reply and ACT on it. I think I forwarded that one to the person at the dot com address; he said he’d contact the sender directly.
There are two people with very similar gmail addresses to mine. One has one consonant doubled but is otherwise identical, the other has an ‘o’ where mine has an ‘a’. I’ve periodically gotten emails for the double-consonant variant - including one Paypal payment (which I of course refunded).
The hearbreaking one was the ‘o-instead-of-a’ one: I got a slew of emails one day, expressing sympathy for someone’s impending death. That person’s first name happened to be the same as my brother, so it gave me a start, but then I realized that a misspelled email must have been distributed. I wound up replying to every one, saying “sorry, I think you have the wrong address, I hope you can track the right one down”. Luckily one of the senders did, and distributed the correct email.
Someone sent a gift subscription to Vogue magazine, and signed up for it with my email address. Likely a typo. I forwarded it to the two-consonant person as the most likely recipient, but never heard back. Vogue still sends me reminders to renew the gift, and I’ve taken to reporting them as spam. Ditto some kind of benefits specialist in another state.
Yeah I get some repeat offenders too. One is a stuntwoman around the Atlanta area, another is a truck driver in the UK, one lives in Australia. I don’t know if they keep giving out the wrong address or organization staff just keep typing it wrong. One time I got like $300 via PayPal and had no idea why. Wrote the guy back asking what it was for and he realized he had sent it to the wrong email address.
Individuals making mistakes I have some sympathy for, but if a big company sends me spam with no Unsubscribe I don’t hesitate to hit Report Spam.
If I don’t have an account with the organization then there are no details to steal. To log in and change the email I would have to reset the password for an account I didn’t create. Changing the password would just lock the legit account holder out of the account, assuming they could even get in there to begin with when the email address is wrong.
It’s just a mess all around, and I try not to feel bad for clicking Report Spam on email that puts me in that situation.
My point is that I think it’s safe to assume such an email is spam.
The spammer isn’t bothering to try to figure out who has an account and who doesn’t; they just pick places that a lot of people do have an account with. They don’t have an individual wrong email address, they have a list of harvested email addresses and are sending to all of them. The concern about someone who has a legitimate account is misplaced; it’s almost certainly not a legitimate message aimed at somebody who needs it. It’s a malicious phishing attempt.
I don’t believe these particular emails are spam/phishing, they aren’t asking for emails or passwords or account resets, they are just informational/signup messages sent to the wrong email (mine.) That is why I hate marking them as spam, but when they give me no way to opt out I do mark them as spam.
Passwords only come into the discussion because these emails are often sent from a non-reply address and the only convenient actions are either Report Spam or try to reset the password and log into the account and remove MY email address from it. Some give ways to contact them but don’t feel like having to research every one, or sit on hold for a long time just to fix a mistyped email that has no benefit for me.
I actually did call SiriusXM a couple times to try and remove my email from their system (they kept emailing me about a Toyota Tundra, I have never owned one) and after being on hold a long time the reps were unable to help. So, Report Spam.
Here is an example, removing names and actual links:
Dear CENTRAL Z [They sent to someone with the same first initial and same last name as me],
You are receiving this e-mail because you opted for e-mail statements. If you would like to change your delivery method, please go to TxTag.org to access your account information.
Thank you,
TxTag Customer Service
Please do not reply to this message. This is an automatically generated notification. If you wish to contact a customer service representative, please call the TxTag Customer Service Center at 1-888-468-9824, or go to TxTag.org and click Contact Us.
“You are receiving this e-mail because you opted for e-mail statements. If you would like to change your delivery method, please go to TxTag.org to access your account information.” Right there, it wants me to log into an account I don’t have. I could, but Report Spam takes 1 second instead of X minutes, and I don’t really want to reset an account that isn’t mine.
Gmail has sloppy, sloppy email protocols. My gmail address is my first initial and full last name, I have had it for a long time. But apparently a distant relative that I do not know began using the same email address except that some letters were capitalized and mine is all lower case. Gmail accepted both address’
Some email programs must ignore capitalization because I began to get email notifications that were not for me. After trying unsuccessfully to contact the other email user, the messages would just bounce back to me, I began unsubscribing to all notifications. I began cancelling appointment notifications.
Sorry Stephanie, you do not have an appointment for an oil change at the Chevy dealership in Missouri next Tuesday, I cancelled it. Same with that appointment with your hair stylist on Wednesday.
I never did hear from poor Stephanie but she did learn to use another email address and the messages stopped. I later learned that she was still using her ex-husband’s email address, he has the exact same name as I do. After that I didn’t feel quite so bad.
The other Dallas Jones (not my real name), probably got a lot of flack from his ex, and I do feel a little bad about that.
I never heard that Gmail would differentiate between upper and lower case. Honestly I’m not sure you’re correct about that, it would break a lot of the Internet email system.
I did figure out one incorrect email. Let’s say my name is John Smith and my email is jsmith@gmail.com. I kept getting email for Jake Smith, and one was something like he needed to renew his UK commercial driver’s permit. An attached document actually listed his actual email address, jasmith@gmail.com or something like that. I forwarded the email to him and let him know that I got a lot of misdirected email for him. He wrote back to thank me, and we speculated if we could be distantly related. So happy ending on that one at least.
I think Gmail is smart enough to parse that, and create the “unsubscribe” button near the report spam button, but maybe that button comes from someplace else. I don’t use Gmail frequently enough to know.
If not, you can click on whatever magic drop down menu to view the raw message, and look through the headers for a List-Unsubscribe or similar line. Then send an email to the annoying123@sloppy-lists.com address, with unsubscribe in the subject line. The actual unsubscribe address will probably be a very long string of random letters and numbers @ the list management company, which may be different than the company that the message is referring to.
See, I’m the opposite. Assuming it’s a legit email and not a phishing attempt, I’d happily go to the site, and reset the password and possibly change it to some other random email address. If, for no other reason, to make sure the next time the person needs to log in, they can’t and when they attempt to reset their password, they won’t be able to since they won’t get the email. In theory, it would prompt them to call in to get things cleared up and hopefully that would include entering their correct email address.
Gmail is funny, they do seem to sometimes recognize that header. But how it works is sometimes when you click Report Spam, a pop-up will ask you “Report Spam and Unsubscribe”, “Report Spam”, or “Cancel.” But there is no option to only Unsubscribe. Not sure if that is an oversight or if it’s another way Google tries to punish certain behaviors on the Internet; not having a proper Unsubscribe link in the email body.
That is a good way to look at it, I could take reasonable steps to remove my email since the person won’t be able to get into their account anyway. Still, if I have to click on stop signs in a Captcha to reset someone else’s password, I will probably still click Report Spam.
I think the idea is that if you want to unsubscribe to something you don’t consider spam, you’ll just open it up and click the unsubscribe button, you wouldn’t be using the report spam button in the first place.
I think you’re missing that all hitting the ‘report spam’ button does is redirect those emails to your spam folder. It’s not that the company is going to get fined or google sets an orphan on fire. You shouldn’t think twice (and really shouldn’t feel bad or guilty) about hitting the spam button for emails you don’t want.
Granted, if they’re getting hundreds of thousands of spam reports from one domain in a short period of time, they may very well block that domain at a higher level (so it never makes it to your mailbox), but hitting the ‘report spam’ button on annoying emails from petco or the local car dealership. Don’t worry about it.
That’s what I’ve been doing lately, as well. What ticks me off is that some of the people using my email address don’t even have the same name as me or anything like it.
Since I’ve begun resetting their password or changing their email address, I’m getting less and less of people’s crap.
EDIT: If I can’t, for some reason do that stuff. I create filters and have those company’s emails go to my trash.
Come to think of it, I might even leave the email alone for a little while, just to see how long it takes for the person to go in and reset it. OTOH, it would mean I’d continue to get all their junk mail until then, which as of now, they clearly aren’t missing.
I can only assume it’s people that aren’t that familiar with the internet (hence not even using the correct email address) or it’s something they weren’t interested in to begin with. The other day I had to sign up with petco so I can place an online order that I’d pick up a few hours later. I assure you if I didn’t get the 7 emails they sent me over the next 48 hours, I wouldn’t have noticed. I might have found it odd if I didn’t get a receipt but I would have promptly forgotten about that.
