For years now, someone has been using a variation on my gmail address to sign up for things, get quotes, register as a sex offender (!!), etc. This person appears to be in the UK based on the responses they’ve gotten. (I am in the US). For background, my email address is lastname.firstname@gmail.com. All of these emails go to lastnamefirstname@gmail.com, without the period in the middle. Gmail’s information on this reads:
Dots don’t matter in Gmail addresses
If someone accidentally adds dots to your address when emailing you, you’ll still get that email. For example, if your email is johnsmith@gmail.com , you own all dotted versions of your address:
I have tried a few tactics to deal with this over the years. I have changed my password, of course, just in case they somehow had access to my account. I have unsubscribed from things that this person has subscribed to, when I get those notifications. I have made sure that my account is not forwarding to some other account. I have emailed some vendors to warn them that the person who they just sent a quote to didn’t actually get it. None of this has fully stopped it happening again.
And the thing I cannot figure out is: WHY? Today, for example, I got an email from Progressive insurance about a requested quote. I unsubscribed and deleted it. But why would this person put my address in there in the first place? They went through the trouble to get a damn insurance quote, and now they don’t have it. I cannot see any benefit to them. And it boggles the mind that it would be a mistake - this has happened dozens of times over the past many years. How could they not know by this point? If it happened a couple of times, I could certainly accept that it was perhaps just a typo, but it’s way more often than that.
Any ideas on what could be going on?
(Not sure if this is the right forum. Feel free to move to IMHO if that is more appropriate).
Never underestimate how clueless people are.
He (or she) probably forgets their address each time they sign up for something, and then can’t understand when they never received the confirmation email.
I would guess that they are just using it instead of a random gibberish address when something requires that you input an email address but you don’t want to give one. Often when trying to get an online insurance quote, it will take you through all the relevant questions then withhold the actual quote unless you give contact details - which would of course result in you being bombarded with stuff from the company in question. If you don’t want this you may be able to circumvent it by giving a fake email address. Once you see the quote, if you want to follow up of course you can do so.
This was my thought too - it’s websites that don’t actually require you to create an account and respond with the verification sent to that email, but do want you to tell them your email (i.e. any email) in order to continue.
Also, I’m not going to experiment, but what happens if the person signs up for an email without the period in the name? Will johnsmith@ be rejected as a duplicate of john.smith@ ? (I’m not going to experiment…) Or did this guy get a valid email and for some reason the emails go randomly to one or other? Another possibility is that your name is a typo or transposition of theirs - ie. kellysmith vs kelleysmith ?
The giveaway is whether they are sending multiple “here is your verification number” thus suggesting they are actually waiting for the email.
This happens to me all the time, and I’m living that XKCD comic – I can sometimes guess, based on what or where the e-mail is for, who it probably goes to.
My name is common enough and I got firstnamelastname@gmail (and at hotmail, same problem), so people sign up for things all the time. I’ve had job rejections, requests to extend time on a final paper, prison funding and food orders, orders for satellite dishes (including driver’s license scans!), various accounts, and so on and so forth.
My guess is that their name is the same as yours. They probably got yournameXX@gmail, and just forget the XX. One guy who confuses my address for his has our birth year at the end (we were born the same year), another guy has his birth month and day. They just leave it off sometimes.
You might get a phone number with one of the errors sometimes. I’ve reached out by phone (just like Cueball in that XKCD comic) and told them of the error.
This will depend on the website, I imagine. Google doesn’t distinguish between them, but the website might. So, someone is firstlast@gmail and someone else is first.last99@gmail but enters first.last@gmail by accident, it would depend on the registering website to distinguish or not.
I don’t think other common email providers do what gmail does with dots, so a website should really distinguish between them.
Last year I suddenly started getting notices at my gmail address from a management company. I did an online search on the sender and found a Facebook site for an apartment complex in Australia. I sent them a message pointing out that they apparently have an incorrect email address for someone at their location, as I am in the US. I got a very nice reply thanking me for the info and apologizing for any inconvenience, and the emails stopped.
Back when we were on vBulletin, we had a serial spammer who did this. We’d get a bunch of spam accounts with the same gmail address, just with the dots in different places. After the dot traveled all the way through the name, we’d get a new one, with the same last name but a new first name (they apparently didn’t think to count in binary, with multiple dots). And no, I don’t know why the last name was always the same: Maybe they were actually legitimate accounts, and the spammer was just going through the whole family?
Yes, as I mentioned in my OP, I have done this sometimes as well, particularly when it was a specific quote or order, like the tree surgeon from whom my doppelganger ordered 125 lime trees, or a new exhaust system for his “Rover.” The responses are sometimes funny and usually very nice. And of course those particular emails stop, but more keep coming from other places, like the Badoo account he recently tried to create.
If we want to go darker… maybe OP was an early adopter and grabbed the “cool” gmail address that is just the name. This person with the same name is resentful that they have to be JohnSmith1982 or something like that, so any time they want to give out a fake email address that is likely to be spammed they use OP’s address out of spite.
My cousin’s wife has the same first initial and last name as me. She has yahoo and gmail addresses, and her yahoo address is the same as my gmail email address (FirstInitialLastName). Sometimes she uses the wrong combination of username and domain, and that’s why I got lots of messages from CVS in Florida. With multiple address from different providers, it is easy to mix them up.
There are two people out there with variations of my email address. Let’s say it’s MaryHadALittleLamb at gmail. Someone has “MarryHadALittleLamb” and someone else has “MeryHadALittleLamb”.
We found out about the one variant when my husband accidentally typed my email wrong, and got a confused response from “Marry”. Another time I got a Paypal payment for “Marry”, then an embarassed email from the sender asking me to reverse.
I found out about “Merry” when I got dozens of emails of support… for her dying husband. I had flagged a couple of them as spam, then looked more closely - and began replying to each one saying “so sorry, I’m not the right person, please let me know if you find the correct email” - and wound up forwarding them all. Someone actually tracked down the correct email and let me know, so I could also send that to misdirected senders.
“Merry” and I have actually accidentally done this to each other - I once tried emailing a photo of my parakeet, and accidentally typed her address, and she accidentally put mine on a travel insurance policy. “Marry” evidently has a kid in school in another state - I periodically get notices from that school. I keep replying to the school saying “not me!” and they have yet to fix it.
Many years back, I owned a domain name for my extended family. somethingsomething dot org. Turns out, there was a real small company with somethingsomething dot com. I periodically got emails misdirected (as we’d set up the domain to auto-forward any nonexistent emails to “admin”, which was me). I’d reply, letting them know the correct domain.
But there was this one dimwit who kept RE-SENDING the same email, finally whining “See this message I keep getting??? I don’t know WHAT’S going on!!!”.
That one, I forwarded to the admin address at somethingsomething dot com, suggesting they might want to directly contact the dimwit in question. Talk about willful cluelessness!!
Ooooh - and HIPAA violation here: My former office phone number was something like 202-555-1212. I could also get faxes to that number, and they’d get emailed to me.
Every now and then, I’d get someone’s MEDICAL records. Whoopsie! I finally found out, from something written on the cover page of such a document, that the real target was an area code one digit off from mine, e.g. 203-555-1212. After that, I started calling the senders (if there was a callback number) and letting them know of the mistake.
My email is like JSmith@gmail.com and I get lots of emails for other J Smiths. John, Jerry, Jake, Jason, Judy, etc. I get UK MOT registrations, receipts from Firestone, corporate meetings, family get-togethers, wine barrel orders from California, stunt woman shooting location details, lots of things. It’s mostly mundane receipts or newsletters from lots of different stores though.
This has me judging the senders quite a bit, if the email doesn’t have an easy unsubscribe I Report as Spam. I know these often come from a cashier that types the email in wrong, but so many emails don’t have any unsubscribe option or expect you to log in (to an account you don’t have) to unsubscribe. Nope, Report as Spam.