Every once in a while, I get an email with either an (apparently) mistyped address or one which was intended for the fellow had my Hotmail addy before me. I usually send a polite reply to the sender informing them that the person they are trying to reach is not at the address they typed, and then I put them on my blocked senders list in case they decide to harass me about it, ignore me and continue, or any other of a wide range of behaviors. It’s a little paranoid, I suppose, but I have nothing else really to say to them, so I don’t see how it hurts.
I just now received one of these (I get quite a few, since I use a Hotmail addy) and I was wondering how other Dopers handle them. Is there an etiquette? I suppose a lot of people might just delete such things. Would anyone here make an effort to try and track down who they really wanted and forward the email? I probably would, if that was in the realm of possibility with generic Hotmail addresses… (“i’m looking for someone named “Dave” who has a Hotmail address that could be mistaken for mine…”)
There exist pictures of me with my hair in pigtails. I don’t show these to many people, but I was going to send them to a friend who I thought might find them amusing.
However, I mistyped their email address. Oops.
I got a response the next day. It was very polite, and said something to the effect of, “Hey, I think you have the wrong address.” I wrote that person again, thanking them for letting me know I’d sent it to the wrong person, and appologizing for not being so careful.
Yeah, just send a reply letting them know that they’ve sent it to the wrong address.
I got an email from a person that intended to write to someone that was going to be married soon. I think the person that sent me the email was a minister or some kind of religious person that was going to be presiding over the marriage. Anyway, at first I just thought it was some bizarre junk mail, so I deleted it. About a week later I got another message from the same address and it was politely hinting at the last message they’d sent, and wondering if the person they’d intended had got it. I sent them a reply, since I thought it might be important, telling them that I didn’t know what they were talking about, and wasn’t who they thought I was. They replied thanking me, and I never heard from them again.
I guess maybe since I paranoid-ly have been blocking these people after letting them know of the error, I’ve never gotten a ‘Thank You’ reply, thus why I was wondering if this was correct.
Not too long ago, I got 3 or 4 emails for someone else within a week, all from different people. I wrote back to all four explaining they had a wrong address and how I’d gotten several emails, wondering what happened. One woman wrote back explaining how the mistake was made - that email address of mine is my first and last names, all one word, both which are very uncommon. There’s another girl with my same name, but uses her middle initial in the email address. Turns out this girl was just starting college, and the lady who wrote back was her high school english teacher, who gave me the correct email.
Probably once a week I get emails for her, and I forward them along to her, and she and I made casual friends through the ordeal.
On one, I pointed out all the spelling and grammatical errors and sent it back to him. I wasn’t doing it to be an a–hole either. It was a professional correspondence, and I really felt bad that he would send such an atrocious email to a business associate.
i once received an email from a guy to his newfound girlfriend… i returned it saying it had reached the wrong person… he replied thanking me, and sent it out to the correct address.
had i not replied, perhaps he might not have realized that he sent it to the wrong address… and a few beautiful thoughts would have been lost forever…
Several years ago I began receiving email for a young woman, a college student, who was half my age. She would get lurid emails from friends detailing nights out with hot studly guys, and boring emails from Mom asking when she would come down for the weekend. Over and over again I would return these emails explaining that it was the wrong address. The friends figured things out right away. Mom was much slower on the uptake. I would get emails from Mom talking about how she kept hearing from "this 40 year old woman who says I am emailing the wrong person. " Finally things improved. It is five years later and I still occasionally receive an email from Mom with details about Great Aunt Bertha’s illness. I always send them back, don’t have the heart to delete.
My university email address is jv233@somewhere. Someone else has jv223. We have almost identical first names, and occasionally have to forward emails saying “Is this for you?” I got one about a date she’d had last night, which could have been embarrassing.
I’m a member of a university society called ‘the assassins.’ During the course of the term we kill each other off with water pistols, dropped cardboard box ‘fridges’, etc. We have pseudonyms. One guy had ‘Leader of the Fre World’ (long story).
jv223 got an email meant for me saying:
Hi J,
So, the plan to assassinate the leader of the free world is going ahead as scheduled. Have you got the weaponry?
Back in college, to send mail to someone else at the university, you just had to type their username which was cuXYZ00 where XYZ were their initals and 00 was used in case people had the same initals. So, for example, one of my friend’s addresses was culmh14. Easy to make a mistake.
Anyway, I had recently broken up with my girlfriend and sent a mail to another friend telling her about it. Got the response:
"I think you meant this for someone else. I noticed right away and didn’t read it though.
P.S. Sorry to hear about your girlfriend. Ok, maybe I did read it."
I wound up writing her back and we actually exchanged e-mail the rest of the semester. Never met her though and that was my last semester, but it was kind of funny
I have a different email address that’s simply “brahe@(isp).” At one point some guy named “Bill Rahe” began telling everyone that that was his email account, and the avalanche began.
Family newsletters, serious business stuff, etc. I got it to stop by CC’ing to each and every person on the family lists that that was not Bill’s address, and make sure he knows that so he’ll stop telling everyone. Eventually it stopped.
And then there was the moron who had the same AIM name as me, but with a capital “I” in place of my lowercase “L.” I fielded way too many idiots with that disaster…
I once misaddressed a message, and got a polite response telling me I had the wrong addy, and suggesting what might be the right one (it was, too). I thought that was a good way of dealing with it.
My advice: send a nice reply letting the person know it’s a “wrong number”. If you don’t reply, they’ll think their target got it, and will wonder when the other person doesn’t respond.
I’ve gotten a few wrong mails, mostly for a person with my name who lives in Sidney. I always send back a note telling them the address was wrong and that I live in Chicago, so they probably want to double check and take me off their address lists.
On a couple of occasions they sent back thank you’s that also asked how Chicago was, so I answered.
Didn’t become pen-pals or anything, but I thought it was friendly of them.
I usually reply and let them know they reached the wrong person.
One time I got an email from a woman who apparently thought she was writing to an old college friend that she hadn’t been in touch with in a while. She gave general update about her life, and she sounded like the sort of person I would really dislike. She was a wealthy, dull, unimaginative housewife. There was something about her and the way she had too much free time on her hands that rubbed me the wrong way. I started my response with “this message obviously wasn’t intended for me because my friends have better things to do than emulate Martha Stewart.” At the end I gave her the phone numbers of some volunteer organizations in her area. My message was probably unnecessarily cruel but it was humorous.
Spammers, as we all know, are evil and tricky people. One of their tactics to verify email addresses is to send to “the wrong person” a non-spam looking email that the “target” might deem significant enough to reply about the “error” (thereby verifying the email address is active).
I would be extremely unlikely to reply to misdirected emails due to this problem.
If you really want to fret about such things, go thru the entire email header and try to determine where it came from. If it is a simple header without multiplie domain forwarding and the originating domain seems respectable (ibm.com or harvard.edu) vs. a yahoo/hotmail/AOL disposable account, then maybe.
You could let them know about the mistake from a throwaway account, either including the email in teh message body or not depending on how secure you’d like to be.
Sort of related to Melandry’s OP, what do people do when it’s a “wrong number” from someone you know? As in, the person accidentally hit your name in the address book, probably while intending to send to the person above or below you (I guess that’s how that could happen). I once got an email from a client, obviously written to a friend, with rather steamy details about a rendevous with a hot date, who, incidentally, was not this person’s spouse.
That was a real “yikes!” moment. Talk about brain scrub.
