Someone has fucked up and used my email address thinking I am a couple that are friends of theirs.
While US politics is no more interesting than Aussie politics - two parties that represent the same things - it is obvious that these people are Republicans. All the emails are really tacky Obama insults.
Should I start replying with pointed comments or just let the whole thing slide?
Usually when I get wrongly addressed emails I politely tell people where they have gone wrong but these guys are fuckwits.
There is an in-between option. Send a polite reply:
"Dear Person-who-wrote-to-me,
I’m sorry to have to point out to you that you mis-addressed the political screed attached below. While I, as a fellow participant in the world of politics, am very glad to see that you are exercising your American first amendment rights with a steaming squirting of insults directed at your own president and commander-in-chief, I must suggest that comment #3 (quote comment number 3) is tasteless at best and racist at worse.
You may want to consider double-checking your addresses in future, in order to avoid this sort of mortifying error, particularly as it is generally considered poor form to air your sticky yellow dirty laundry to your friends and allies Down Under.
There’s no real point to replying to them, as it certainly won’t change their minds. Better to add the address to your block list/spam filter and be done with it.
I used to get misdirected email messages intended for a bank in Europe (Nordea or something, I forget). At first I tried to politely tell people they had the wrong address, and after a while even told them what the right address was. All I got back from it was abuse and insults like, “You must be an American, because all Americans are arrogant and think they are better than the rest of the world.” After that I just deleted them.
I’ve tried this, when I used to get email from someone who had the same last name as me, and the same first initial. I got piles of emails from this guy’s friends and family, and at first I would just reply and say they’ve got the wrong address. But the emails kept coming, even from the same people, so I eventually just set a filter to automatically trash emails from those senders.
Oddly enough it happened twice: some woman in the US, unrelated to this other guy I think, was signing up for stuff with my email address. One of them turned out to be an order confirmation for a mattress or something, and so I was able to get a phone number, call, and explain the situation. It wound up being an older lady who used her initial/last name with a previous email provider and got confused when she switched to Gmail. I still get the odd mail from companies addressed to her, but I just ignore them now.
Did this person use the “include everyone in my address book and don’t use the Bcc function” to send the email? I’d send a snarky-yet-factual response aka Attack’s example, using the “Reply to All” option.
Much fun, but be prepared for some hate mail. At which point you can just use your spam or “delete on receipt” filter.
A new employee sent a nasty email to her friend, but addressed it to the manager who writes and emails the shift schedule. After sending an email in response, we never heard from her again.
At my last job, a co-worker found herself in a situation like this, except the sender spoke Spanish. She asked me to help her out because, although I wasn’t even close to being fluent, I could recall enough from my school days to hammer out a basic response explaining that this was the wrong e-mail address. When I talked to my Spanish-speaking aunt later on, she said that I was just a little off, but still close enough.
I have a distant relative who posts here. We have the same mother and the same father. He routinely used to screw up my email address (hotmail vs yahoo vs gmail). He got in the habit of cc-ing all possible variants of my address.
After a few years we got a plaintive plea that we stop cc-ing the guy at hotmail, as he’d had enough of hearing of the deranged antics of my family. It turns out the first few times he’d tried to tell my relative that he was not the right recipient, my relative though it was me, screwing around.
