I have been getting financial emails from several people for many years at my GMail ID. They apparently have given my address but without the dot.
But what mystifies me is how these people keep going for years without ever realising they aren't getting account transaction emails (from their banks), notifications of stock trades, even OTP emails etc. How is it possible for people to use these services for years without ever wondering why they aren't getting the routine emails they're supposed to get or even why they aren't getting the OTP email they had generated?
Also none of the institutions I contacted to ask their clients to update their correct email bothered to do so. On the contrary they sent me back what looked like automated replies asking if their customer service was satisfactory.
At this point I'm sorely tempted to delete my email and start over with another service provider. The nuisance of having to delete almost a dozen emails not meant for you every single day is annoying to say the least. At least with spam you get it sent to spam folder and there it stays. Confidential emails not meant for you is awkward and uncomfortable to have to put up with.
Been there. I posted about this before but I own a 5 character common first and last name @gmail.com address. I get misdirected emails _constantly_.
Usually I am polite about it and let people know, but sometimes I make a game of it. I was invited to participate in a drum circle with an offer to pay for my flight to which I replied that I would love to join, but they would also have to pay for drum lessons. I got a mother insisting that I come home for the weekend to which I replied that I am home, perhaps she hadn't knocked hard enough.. etc.
At one point I got like 15 emails deriding me and my choice to "not support firefighters". Turns out that a member of a city council had listed his email as councilman.<me>@gmail.com and most people just ignored everything before that period. I took it as a challenge to see what the most outlandish thing I could say was that would be believed. Some of the better attempts: "My wife had an affair with a firefighter once!" and "My house has never burned down, why do we even need these guys?".. etc.
With most of the financial emails you can unsubscribe at least. =/
Some dude 2,000 miles away from me has bought a Lexus and now I get regular emails about the status of his vehicle, receipts for all work done to it, and reminders of all maintenance not done to it. For a year and counting.
Each email helpfully includes instructions for unsubscribing: First, you log into the Lexus app...
I finally got fed up with it and reported them to abuse@.
> I own a 5 character common first and last name @gmail.com address
Were you a Google employee? Or did you mean something other than how I read this, that your first and last name combined are 5 characters? Because I believe 5-character usernames are not permitted for gmail addresses.
I tried to confirm this and provide a link, but all of support.google.com appears to be non-responsive right now. When it stars working again, this may support my assertion: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/9211434?hl=en
As the lucky early adopter of gmail I got my last name only @gmail.com. It has been a blessing and a curse.
I have a boilerplate "you have the wrong address" email in multiple languages that I use to reply to the first email from real people. If they persist they then get added to my auto-reply "you have the wrong address" and delete rule.
For automated emails, I don't even bother trying to unsubscribe. They all get added to the delete blacklist rule.
Some of the more fun mistakes I have gotten have been multiple years worth of tax documents from New South Wales, Wine Tastings in South Africa, Church Choir concerts in Germany, and resumes for a receptionist in Colorado at a Gym.
My e-doppelgängers have priced cars across the state of Ohio, been active in the PTA, pursued higher education in Germany, and seems to always be interested in commercial real estate in the outer boroughs of NYC.
Though once -- I received an email asking me to please just apologize to my sister already.
I replied, "I think you have the wrong email address; I don't have a sister."
I saw a response -- "HOW COULD YOU SAY THAT? Your mother is crying." I thought it best to just walk away at that point.
Same exact issue. Especially with people from Africa for some reason. I get a lot of stuff from 3 people from Kenya, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. Most everything there is managed by phone, and they just use my email as a throw-away address. The guy in South Africa has a collections agency after him. The guy in Kenya likes to order food delivery quite a bit. I occasionally change his order to extra spicy. The guy in Zimbabwe works for a college of some sort. I make sure he's signed up for all the educational trips to Europe.
Also some senior woman in Oregon, who is a frequenter of "silver singles".
Some industrial supply company in Canada is very confused by the fake Groupon I sent them for the free stuff they are trying to bill me for.
Some guy in Australia has his security deposit box setup with my address, and is way overdue on some payments.
(I've tried multiple times to correct the wrong email address of the people I mess with, and have been ignored)
Lots of US political junk mail, from many localities, both parties. LOTS AND LOTS OF KINKY PORN SITES.
Fortunately none of them have the dot in the address and I have a filter to send them all directly to trash.
Yep, I live with this too... I thought it luck that I got <my_last_name>@gmail.com early on, turns out it was a curse. It's not a _common_ last name, but people with the last name seem to assume it is theirs, or maybe people miss the other letters in addresses they are given and just use the last name?
I used to get periodic emails from an elderly German couple giving me their train itinerary for their upcoming visit. I politely reply that I'm not their cousin, and consequently their cousin probably won't be there at the train station when they arrive. And then six months later it all starts again.
I have what I assume is a distant cousin on the east coast and I get an email with an invoice every time the pest control folks come out to his house to spray. No option to unsubscribe, and I've given up calling the company to let them know they have the wrong address.
There is a fellow in Quebec whose <first_inital><last_name> == <my_last_name>, and for a while I got monthly emails because someone was trying to wire him money. Again, no option to unsubscribe.
Lately I've started getting emails from universities interested in admitting another distant cousin in Oregon. I'm guessing some college lead-generation service crossed her name with my email (her/our last name). I haven't figured how to handle that one yet, I'm contemplating printing a few out and (snail) mailing them along with a note.
But I've had the address long enough that I don't want to let it go, so I guess this is all a necessary burden......
You can filter your gmail based on the TO field (so anything without the dot goes to spam) if you like. I've done the same thing myself intentionally: I give the dot-less version to sites/companies where I need to receive an email or two (account confirmation etc). Then I manually grab them from spam and then forget the whole thing knowing I'll never see the other crap they send me.
Hope that helps, as someone with a common name I sympathize enormously.
I've done this — I have a filter to move any email I receive without a dot into a "Not For Me" folder, which I periodically go through and usually send a canned response back about how they probably have the wrong person.
You can also automate this part, perhaps to reply with "You probably have the wrong person, but if it is actually for me I'll get back to you shortly".
I have a fairly common first name and last name and I thought I was a genius when I jumped onto an early gmail invitation in (I think) early 2005 to bag my "firstname.lastname@gmail.com".
Now I realise I was a chump and should probably have just stuck with sexxiboi69@hotmail.com
> But what mystifies me is how these people keep going for years without ever realising they aren't getting account transaction emails (from their banks), notifications of stock trades, even OTP emails etc. How is it possible for people to use these services for years without ever wondering why they aren't getting the routine emails they're supposed to get or even why they aren't getting the OTP email they had generated?
Perhaps they also get paper statements in the mail and text message notifications, and don't even know that they also are being sent redundant emails?
(It can go the other way, too. I think I've got some of my financial institutions configured to only send me email and text. If one was also still sending paper statements and those were going to the wrong address, I'd never notice).
> But what mystifies me is how these people keep going for years without ever realising they aren't getting account transaction emails
I put the blame squarely on those vendors. "well, we made them type it twice, what more do you want?" Please, please, just pretend it's a communications channel and close the loop!
Notes from BankCorp Ticket BUG-14333: "CIO saw some post on HN so we need to change the email validation. Make them type it three times."
> But what mystifies me is how these people keep going for years without ever realising they aren't getting account transaction emails (from their banks), notifications of stock trades, even OTP emails etc.
Because they never received the first one, so it's not abnormal to miss the n emails after that.
I've encountered the same problem. One day I'm going to stop being polite and cancel the Hotel Reservations, Conference Invites, and other shit that this guy keeps signing up for using my email address. Maybe that will get him to finally pay attention.
I have the same but it seems to be one specific person in Canada (I'm in the UK). I started getting emails about college prospectuses and applications, then I started getting them about library fines. I tried to email the library and inform them that they had the wrong email address and got nothing back. The latest has been emails from a car dealership trying to confirm some options for a new car.
I can't believe this person is missing so many emails that are presumably quite important to them. I can only assume they have the same first name as me but spelt differently and that other people are typing their address in wrong to various systems.
These days I just ignore every email like that, mostly for fear that one day I'll end up stuck with someone trying to hold me responsible for something.
My gmail doppleganger signs me up for mostly animal charities and religious stuff. I keep unsubscribing and marking as spam. Sometimes I wonder if she does this on purpose, giving a "fake email" to people she doesn't want to deal with. If so, Diane, there's a real person with that email, and quit throwing all your spam at me.
My gmail address is simply my lastname @ gmail.com
So I get a lot of emails meant for other people whose email is firstname.mylastname@gmail.com where some sender drops the firstname and the dot for some reason.
I received airline reservations (where I can click and change seat assignments!), cancer diagnoses(!), wedding invitations, bank statements, real estate documents to verisign, all sorts of things.
I've been tempted to do things like switch the person's seat to a middle in the back by the bathroom, but while I've clicked through to see if I _could_ do it, I never actually completed it. I did once send my regrets to a wedding invitation.
> But what mystifies me is how these people keep going for years without ever realising they aren't getting account transaction emails
The inverse happens too! Sallie Mae regularly snail mails me to tell me that the (snail mail) address they have on file for me — the same one they send this notice to — is undeliverable! I get all the normal mail (like account statements), too…
I get physical mail for a previous owner, even though I've lived here for five years. Usually I notice, I write "Not at this address" and cross through the address in Sharpie then shove it into a mailbox, per regulations.
More recently I forgot to check the front before opening. I realised when the contents were about a mortgage account, I don't like debt so I certainly wouldn't have a mortgage.
Apparently the previous owner still has a mortgage on this place, which would worry me if not for the fact I have monitoring set up so I know the Land Registry says it's mine, which means even if the idiot bank thinks they've got security for a loan they are wrong and the government will cheerfully tell a court of law that if asked. Hopefully they just didn't update the name of the mortgage and actually security is now in the form of some other property bought with the proceeds of the sale to me, but who knows, these idiots didn't understand "Not at this address" for five years.
I decided to call the bank about this mistakenly opened letter, but because of COVID they weren't usefully taking calls. I could remain in a queue for fifteen minutes and then get automatically dumped out with "We're sorry" if I wanted. So I just chucked the letter in the recycling.
If you need a recommendation for a Bank never to do business with in the UK (certainly not to trust with regards to where their customers live) it would be Halifax.
I get the same thing all the time. I think it's relatively common for people who signed up for Gmail early, and thus we able to get a bare named email (i.e., no numbers afterwards like john.doe420).
The weird thing for me is that it seems to be more than just a single person writing down the wrong email or using it for junk mail. I have gotten emails from places all over the US, a couple places in the UK, and in the past year or so from someone in France. And while some of it is junk mail, I've gotten emails about rental agreements, company emails, insurance policies...
I used to try to be nice and email people back and tell them they had the wrong person. Now I just delete them. It's not worth the time and effort. Unless it's a kind old lady sending an email to her grandson, it's getting deleted. Hopefully their insurance company or whoever will call them after not hearing a response. Unlike regular mail, there's no consistent "return to sender" function, so...deleted.
I get a guy's bank info from the east coast of the US. Recently, he started using Zelle. His Zelle activity was being emailed to me. One of his Zelle recipients used a phone number. I was able to call her, get his phone number and tell him about this issue. He still hasn't updated his email address. I don't get it...
> At this point I'm sorely tempted to delete my email and start over with another service provider.
Why not? Or you could start over without deleting your current email and go into Gmail settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP > Add a forwarding address, and make it forward all of your emails to your new provider, where it should be easy to sort all emails from your old address to a certain folder or tag that you only check and clean, say, once a week (for any senders that don’t have your new email).
Same exact situation here. I have {commonFirstName}.{commonLastName}@gmail.com and get so much legit email without the dot for other people with my name. There’s at least a few of them - a retired vet, a substitute teacher in Ireland, a middle school student in Montana. And just this week I got some from a bail bond place for a kid in Texas that included his picture. I don’t understand how these people aren’t constantly confused about not getting emails they expect
I've purchased a truck in Florida, been going to college in (I forget which state) for a few years now, opened an LLC AND filed for divorce with Legal zoom, was part of a venture partnership with multiple personal invite and discussion emails about investment meetings, and more! I've responded many times to these and the only replies are from the last one, and Legal zoom (who told me sorry, disregard it??)
I'm confused. Do people just assume they can think of an email address and Google somehow knows and assigns it to them automatically?
Like they're signing up for something and put in "santosh83@gmail.com" and think "My name is Santosh and I was born in '83. Google obviously knows this and will send me this email!" ????????
If you ever figure out why people do this or what their thinking is, let me know, but yeah this actually happens. I have a common name but a long and uncommon surname, and I have name.surname@gmail.com.
This GP from New Zealand signs up for EVERYTHING under my gmail account. A handful of it spam, but mostly important stuff - notifications for financial transactions make up most of the mails I receive.
I have called his offices repeatedly to try to discuss it with him, and even have a reasonable rapport with his secretary, but he never wants to take my calls.
I can't see that being the case (except exceedingly rarely) but perhaps if they had "santosh83@live.com" on an MS device and then got a device with Google mail they think their address is now "santosh83@gmail.com"? Or they're just nuts ...
Same. The ones that surprise me are the credit card information or cell phone plans. I was able to contact the phone company and tell them to remove my address, but the credit card was an exercise in frustration. You can't get through without account or personal info. I just mark most of them as spam these days.
Forward the email with the explanation you've given to abuse@<sender>. Most companies should have someone monitoring such an inbox. If that doesn't work I'd call the desk of the cto or shame them on Twitter.
I share a name with a builder from Queensland and have been getting his email for years - loan applications, hardware receipts, updates about his rental properties, apprenticeship schemes - you name it. What's insane about it is how many people insisted they had the correct address when I used to follow up.
What's strange to me is why they thought that email address would work -- after all it's not their address. I've got years of emails from France for the same reason.
You can set up a filter for the incorrect version of your email address (any email to namenodot@gmail.com) and get those out of your inbox.
Lots of people don't understand how the Internet really works, or realize that there might be another person with the name of the person they're trying to contact.
You get financial emails, I got about $1,200 through quickpay / zelle via my email address.
Still waiting for them to contact me at the email _they_ used, to ask for their money back. I have no way of contacting them as the sender info is hidden.
I had someone open a bank account with my email and I called the bank thinking someone was stealing my ID or something. How do people not know their own email address?
Why not filter? If you know you always use the dot, filter without the dot. It works for me when I tried to set it up. Can even blacklist certain senders specifically so that if there are a few out there you made without the dot you will still get them.
Yes, I do have it filtered. And yes, contacted all the institutions. They don't bother at all in updating their records. And these are banks and other financial institutions. One would think they'd take the integrity of their data more seriously.
You can set up filters in gmail to either automatically go to a different folder ("label" they call it), or to just delete them. It's not hard at all once you get used to the interface, and there's a wide variety of rule options.
Annoyingly that is different, everything after the + is _ignored_ so only one person can have <first>+<any lastname>@gmail.com. Other people I am guessing use first.lastname and that is where the confusion is. =)
A coworker of mine got an email once containing important scholarship information intended for a high school kid in Florida. He did a little looking online and found the kid's and his parent's actual email addresses and forwarded the email to them.
So here's where it gets weird/dumb: the kid replies to my friend and his parents and says, "hey mom, you put the wrong email address on my application, there's no dot in mine."
So my coworker, being the only tech savvy person on the thread replies. "Well, actually, [...]" and explains how dots are(n't) handled in Gmail address. Then the parents then reply and write, "but that's your old Gmail address, we had to get you a new one when we moved to Florida."
At this point my coworker gave up and the kid presumably lost his scholarship because his family didn't know you could keep your Gmail address when you moved houses.
I'm in a similar situation. I was lucky enough to claim my Gmail address during the beta.
For the first few years I tried to be kind and alert the sender, but it just became impractical to do so.
It breaks my heart when I see my name twin receiving state benefit notifications or HR notices at the wrong address. He's currently applying for quite a few electrician openings. Good luck, my man.
Happens all the time to me. Some of my fellow [first-initial][last-names] are "smart" people -- a professor and a judge, among others -- and I know that they are putting in their own email wrong.
I know this because I'm frequently getting mail from automated systems for something they filled out.
I mean, I know there's an xkcd about this, but seriously? How do you mistype your own email address so often? In both cases, their real addresses are [first-name][last-name].
> you could keep your Gmail address when you moved houses.
In understanding what went wrong here, it's worth noting that historically it was more common to have your email service provided by your ISP. If you moved to a house that wasn't served by the same ISP, your new ISP provided email bundled with the rest of the service at no extra charge, and you didn't want to keep paying to retain your old email, there were circumstances under which a move of house might have motivated a change of email.
Of course this was never relevant to gmail, but it might have been a part of the reason for the confusion. Or it might very well not have.
I occasionally see a public-ish figure with a website where they publish their email address. This last week, saw someone who advertised their "@cox.com" address. I move way too often to have any kind of confidence in a utility email address like that.
> At this point my coworker gave up and the kid presumably lost his scholarship because his family didn't know you could keep your Gmail address when you moved houses.
I think their meaning was they stopped replying to further email back and forth with people who clearly were very far from understanding and whose ongoing conversation was becoming increasingly frustrating to deal with due to their misplace mental model around how email works which then then relied upon to continue to correspond with the sender.
similar. A younger fella has my first and last name. I've gotten iphone receipts and questions on when I'm coming back to the Y (in very far away location). The best was when I got his deployment orders. I figured I probably was not supposed to ship out on a submarine, so I reached out to the sender to let them know. /shrug.
Everyone in this thread is replying with instances of receiving emails meant for other people, but dots have nothing to do with that. It's people typing in the wrong email address in a signup page (with dots or without), and the service not verifying it. The latter is what really needs to be fixed.
I personally find this Gmail feature (as well as the ability to append +anything to your email address) extremely useful.
In my experience, it's mostly the situations where people give their emails in person that are a problem: Receipts from in-store purchases (and in-store credit card signups), hotel reservations and rewards programs, EMR signups, lawyers offices, banks, realtors, etc.
Websites are pretty good at verifying email addresses these days. The real world, not so much. The super funny part is when you try to ask the bank/doctor/etc. to stop sending someone else's personal info to your email address, and they tell you they can't make that change since you aren't the account owner.
Another possibility is that companies try to guess your email address. I recently got an email thanking me for buying a lawnmower that I never bought. The buyer's mailing address was in the email, so I sent him a letter. He replied saying he's "old school", and doesn't have an email account. He has no idea how the manufacturer got my email address, as he had left the email address field blank when filling out the warranty form. The only explanation I can come up with is that they just guessed it based on first and last name.
I think that companies' failure to verify their users' email addresses during signup is a serious problem that goes beyond any dot confusion.
When John Smith signs up for an account using JohnSmith@gmail.com (or John.Smith@gmail.com), and the company trusts John Smith to have provided the email address accurately, three parties are affected: Both John Smiths and the company itself. Yes, verifying email address creates a bit more signup friction, but the consequences of getting it wrong way outweigh that friction for the privacy risk and confusion it causes (unless all the company cares about is a meaningless sign-up metric).
Amazon has been sending me someone else's order details for about a year now. It's crazy to me for multiple reasons:
1. They send this information (order details, name, address, tracking numbers, receipt) without requiring a confirmation email. In fact, in their system the email on the other guy's account is labeled "unverified".
2. The emails contain no way to stop future emails. There's no "unsubscribe", "this is not me", "contact us", etc. Every link is to an Amazon page which expects the user to be logged in to the correct account.
3. The system does not sufficiently lock old accounts when the account email is reused. One suggestion from Amazon was to create a new account using my email, which should lock the other account. This did not happen, so now there are two accounts able to send Amazon emails to me with no way to tell them apart.
4. The Amazon website doesn't verify the user's account before displaying order details. If I click on a link from the other person's order return (or other types of links), Amazon opens up to my account but displays information from their order. It's confusing to see someone else's "refund status" alongside my account name on the official Amazon.com site.
5. Getting this fixed is a pain in the ass. I call, they say they'll fix it. I call, they suggest something else. I call, they escalate, try something else again. I chat, can't be handled over chat, they call me, try another thing. I'm not sure why they won't remove the email from his account or contact him and ask him to remove it.
Some of them also only allow you to unsubscribe or contact support through logging in to your account. Which I could easily do through a password reset but that's illegal so I'm not going to bother.
I'm still getting credit card statements from an Indian bank. I can confirm the PDF password is easily cracked :)
James is wrong, this is Netflix's fault. The same "scam" would work under a variety of circumstances because Netflix relies on something it has no reason to believe is true. Maybe you signed up to Netflix but your house mate thinks she did, she gets an email because of Eve, now you're both paying for Netflix, but actually she's paying for Eve's account.
Netflix could make this mistake with postal addresses even, if for some reason they used postal addresses. You get a letter from Netflix, you don't notice it's addressed to Eve, who had stupidly written your address instead of hers, you pay for her Netflix.
This is a data protection violation, data processors have a duty to take reasonable care that the personal information they have about data subjects is correct. If you need it, make sure it's accurate. If you don't need it, don't collect it.
This is actually Google's fault. Because Google is large enough Netflix could be nice and have special handling for Gmail addresses but this would be going against the email RFC that says $inbox1+$subaddr@domain == $inbox2+$subaddr@domain iff $inbox1 and $inbox2 are identical.
Netflix has zero idea how any particular email operator mangles or maps inboxes to actual users. Apple's private email service maps all sorts of inboxes to the same actual person. Mailinator maps every address to everyone.
OP of that post has an ad at the bottom for their product that I actually found compelling.
It's a screencast tool- but instead of putting a video of your face in the corner, it overlays/ghosts your face on top of the full screen you're sharing.
Now sure how well it would work in practice. Maybe it's too distracting.
Wouldn't the real James be notified that someone used his email to sign up for another Netflix account? When 'Eve' signed up for Netflix with james.hfisher@gmail.comm the signup confirmation would go to jameshfisher@ inbox?
Dots does matter in GSuite's email addresses (those are the email addresses for enterprise via work or school.)
Also in the email name part of the email address, anything after + (plug sign) and before the @ (at sign) don't matter either. [1] This is the same behavior for personal Gmail and GSuite email (Gmail for enterprises)
It definitely is. For example I get a lot of emails sent to me+ni@mydomian for "Not Important" which I use kind of like an RSS reader. They never appear in my inbox and I catch up on them every once and a while.
You can do this for a wide variety of things and combine it with filters to get a lot of extra value from your email.
You'd be surprised how many legacy registration systems break because of the + 'trick'.
Ever since I got a basic Gsuite plan and set up a catch-all email address, I can just use websitename@mydomain and then use filters which is oh so practical!
Not only do dots not matter, you can suffix "+<anything>" to your user name before the "@gmail.com" and it will still come to your email address. I actually love this "+" feature and use it a lot .. like send an email to "+bookmark@gmail.com" to bookmark a link, or register with "+nospam" and setup a filter for that address if anyone sends me email on that.
No, this is neither supported nor not supported by any email provider - it is part of the email specification. It works that way with all email systems, unless they are non-RFC compliant.
It is not a part of RFC5322, RFC2822 or RFC822 - nothing in those RFCs establish any particular semantics of local-part (the part before "@"), and in terms of syntax IIRC those RFCs only defines the escaping rules (backslashes, quotes, etc).
RFC5233 mentions the established practice of using a separator character that splits local-part into "user" and "detail" pieces, but does not standardize any particular syntax for the separator (it cites "+" and "#" as possible examples). Moreover, this RFC is about Sieve language, and it is out of its scope to define such standard for email addresses.
RFC3696 mentions "user+mailbox@example.com" but does not define any semantics, merely citing this as an example of a valid email address, then going to how it must be escaped in a mailto: URL.
It is completely up to a particular provider to implement (or not) any subaddressing syntax and any logic related to it. No email specification I'm aware of makes this a requirement. (It's not like I've read every email RFC thoroughly, though, so I could be missing something.)
Also a good check if the site has some sloppy implementation. More than once have I seen that my "+" email was not accepted because of invalid characters. I take this as a sign to not trust the site's security too.
This is not always accidental. Facebook, for example, does not allow a '+' in your email address and you cannot tell me that the engineers at Facebook don't know about the "+" in gmail addresses. The simplest explanation is that Facebook wants to make sure you are not signing up with an alias account. That is, they want your _real_ address, just like they insist on having your real name and other personal info.
If I were a site accepting email addresses, I could see rejecting "+" stuff because chances are it's people trying to pull something funny like registering multiple accounts when I only want one per email address. If I were less confrontational I might just silently strip the "+" part.
I have this problem, except it's a whole nation (seemingly) of people due to how common my last name is in a specific country.
My address is [first initial][last name]@gmail so anyone with a first name that starts with the same letter as mine and the same last name (which, there are SO MANY).
I get;
job offers
family photos (I typically respond letting these people know they're not getting through to whoever they're intending)
verizon bills (I'm also a verizon customer and they absolutely refuse to take my email off of the other two accounts - I've also texted both accounts since they're numbers have come through various times in the correspondences and they don't even acknowledge my communication let alone update their accounts - they're always late on their payments, but have the newest iPhone's all the time :D)
purchase receipts from so many retailers I don't keep track (some of these people have real silly amounts of money)
auto purchase receipts
bank emails
lease offers (just today I had to respond to a leasing agent who was trying to let someone know they got a place they were trying to rent in NYC for crazy money)
It's mind blowing to me how many people get their email address wrong and miss so many important emails, seemingly without ever realizing it.
Readit News
But what mystifies me is how these people keep going for years without ever realising they aren't getting account transaction emails (from their banks), notifications of stock trades, even OTP emails etc. How is it possible for people to use these services for years without ever wondering why they aren't getting the routine emails they're supposed to get or even why they aren't getting the OTP email they had generated?
Also none of the institutions I contacted to ask their clients to update their correct email bothered to do so. On the contrary they sent me back what looked like automated replies asking if their customer service was satisfactory.
At this point I'm sorely tempted to delete my email and start over with another service provider. The nuisance of having to delete almost a dozen emails not meant for you every single day is annoying to say the least. At least with spam you get it sent to spam folder and there it stays. Confidential emails not meant for you is awkward and uncomfortable to have to put up with.
Usually I am polite about it and let people know, but sometimes I make a game of it. I was invited to participate in a drum circle with an offer to pay for my flight to which I replied that I would love to join, but they would also have to pay for drum lessons. I got a mother insisting that I come home for the weekend to which I replied that I am home, perhaps she hadn't knocked hard enough.. etc.
At one point I got like 15 emails deriding me and my choice to "not support firefighters". Turns out that a member of a city council had listed his email as councilman.<me>@gmail.com and most people just ignored everything before that period. I took it as a challenge to see what the most outlandish thing I could say was that would be believed. Some of the better attempts: "My wife had an affair with a firefighter once!" and "My house has never burned down, why do we even need these guys?".. etc.
With most of the financial emails you can unsubscribe at least. =/
Some dude 2,000 miles away from me has bought a Lexus and now I get regular emails about the status of his vehicle, receipts for all work done to it, and reminders of all maintenance not done to it. For a year and counting.
Each email helpfully includes instructions for unsubscribing: First, you log into the Lexus app...
I finally got fed up with it and reported them to abuse@.
Were you a Google employee? Or did you mean something other than how I read this, that your first and last name combined are 5 characters? Because I believe 5-character usernames are not permitted for gmail addresses.
I tried to confirm this and provide a link, but all of support.google.com appears to be non-responsive right now. When it stars working again, this may support my assertion: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/9211434?hl=en
I have a boilerplate "you have the wrong address" email in multiple languages that I use to reply to the first email from real people. If they persist they then get added to my auto-reply "you have the wrong address" and delete rule.
For automated emails, I don't even bother trying to unsubscribe. They all get added to the delete blacklist rule.
Some of the more fun mistakes I have gotten have been multiple years worth of tax documents from New South Wales, Wine Tastings in South Africa, Church Choir concerts in Germany, and resumes for a receptionist in Colorado at a Gym.
My e-doppelgängers have priced cars across the state of Ohio, been active in the PTA, pursued higher education in Germany, and seems to always be interested in commercial real estate in the outer boroughs of NYC.
Though once -- I received an email asking me to please just apologize to my sister already.
I replied, "I think you have the wrong email address; I don't have a sister."
I saw a response -- "HOW COULD YOU SAY THAT? Your mother is crying." I thought it best to just walk away at that point.
Also some senior woman in Oregon, who is a frequenter of "silver singles".
Some industrial supply company in Canada is very confused by the fake Groupon I sent them for the free stuff they are trying to bill me for.
Some guy in Australia has his security deposit box setup with my address, and is way overdue on some payments.
(I've tried multiple times to correct the wrong email address of the people I mess with, and have been ignored)
Lots of US political junk mail, from many localities, both parties. LOTS AND LOTS OF KINKY PORN SITES.
Fortunately none of them have the dot in the address and I have a filter to send them all directly to trash.
> The guy in Zimbabwe works for a college of some sort. I make sure he's signed up for all the educational trips to Europe.
Both made me laugh, you are a wild man!
I used to get periodic emails from an elderly German couple giving me their train itinerary for their upcoming visit. I politely reply that I'm not their cousin, and consequently their cousin probably won't be there at the train station when they arrive. And then six months later it all starts again.
I have what I assume is a distant cousin on the east coast and I get an email with an invoice every time the pest control folks come out to his house to spray. No option to unsubscribe, and I've given up calling the company to let them know they have the wrong address.
There is a fellow in Quebec whose <first_inital><last_name> == <my_last_name>, and for a while I got monthly emails because someone was trying to wire him money. Again, no option to unsubscribe.
Lately I've started getting emails from universities interested in admitting another distant cousin in Oregon. I'm guessing some college lead-generation service crossed her name with my email (her/our last name). I haven't figured how to handle that one yet, I'm contemplating printing a few out and (snail) mailing them along with a note.
But I've had the address long enough that I don't want to let it go, so I guess this is all a necessary burden......
Hope that helps, as someone with a common name I sympathize enormously.
E.g. johndoe+mailinglist@gmail.com
Unfortunately some services won’t accept that as a valid address.
You can also automate this part, perhaps to reply with "You probably have the wrong person, but if it is actually for me I'll get back to you shortly".
Now I realise I was a chump and should probably have just stuck with sexxiboi69@hotmail.com
If you put that on your resume and they hire you, it's probably a good place to work.
Perhaps they also get paper statements in the mail and text message notifications, and don't even know that they also are being sent redundant emails?
(It can go the other way, too. I think I've got some of my financial institutions configured to only send me email and text. If one was also still sending paper statements and those were going to the wrong address, I'd never notice).
I put the blame squarely on those vendors. "well, we made them type it twice, what more do you want?" Please, please, just pretend it's a communications channel and close the loop!
Notes from BankCorp Ticket BUG-14333: "CIO saw some post on HN so we need to change the email validation. Make them type it three times."
Because they never received the first one, so it's not abnormal to miss the n emails after that.
I can't believe this person is missing so many emails that are presumably quite important to them. I can only assume they have the same first name as me but spelt differently and that other people are typing their address in wrong to various systems.
These days I just ignore every email like that, mostly for fear that one day I'll end up stuck with someone trying to hold me responsible for something.
So I get a lot of emails meant for other people whose email is firstname.mylastname@gmail.com where some sender drops the firstname and the dot for some reason.
I received airline reservations (where I can click and change seat assignments!), cancer diagnoses(!), wedding invitations, bank statements, real estate documents to verisign, all sorts of things.
I've been tempted to do things like switch the person's seat to a middle in the back by the bathroom, but while I've clicked through to see if I _could_ do it, I never actually completed it. I did once send my regrets to a wedding invitation.
The inverse happens too! Sallie Mae regularly snail mails me to tell me that the (snail mail) address they have on file for me — the same one they send this notice to — is undeliverable! I get all the normal mail (like account statements), too…
More recently I forgot to check the front before opening. I realised when the contents were about a mortgage account, I don't like debt so I certainly wouldn't have a mortgage.
Apparently the previous owner still has a mortgage on this place, which would worry me if not for the fact I have monitoring set up so I know the Land Registry says it's mine, which means even if the idiot bank thinks they've got security for a loan they are wrong and the government will cheerfully tell a court of law that if asked. Hopefully they just didn't update the name of the mortgage and actually security is now in the form of some other property bought with the proceeds of the sale to me, but who knows, these idiots didn't understand "Not at this address" for five years.
I decided to call the bank about this mistakenly opened letter, but because of COVID they weren't usefully taking calls. I could remain in a queue for fifteen minutes and then get automatically dumped out with "We're sorry" if I wanted. So I just chucked the letter in the recycling.
If you need a recommendation for a Bank never to do business with in the UK (certainly not to trust with regards to where their customers live) it would be Halifax.
The weird thing for me is that it seems to be more than just a single person writing down the wrong email or using it for junk mail. I have gotten emails from places all over the US, a couple places in the UK, and in the past year or so from someone in France. And while some of it is junk mail, I've gotten emails about rental agreements, company emails, insurance policies...
I used to try to be nice and email people back and tell them they had the wrong person. Now I just delete them. It's not worth the time and effort. Unless it's a kind old lady sending an email to her grandson, it's getting deleted. Hopefully their insurance company or whoever will call them after not hearing a response. Unlike regular mail, there's no consistent "return to sender" function, so...deleted.
A week later I got an apology email, and the incorrect emails stopped.
Why not? Or you could start over without deleting your current email and go into Gmail settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP > Add a forwarding address, and make it forward all of your emails to your new provider, where it should be easy to sort all emails from your old address to a certain folder or tag that you only check and clean, say, once a week (for any senders that don’t have your new email).
Like they're signing up for something and put in "santosh83@gmail.com" and think "My name is Santosh and I was born in '83. Google obviously knows this and will send me this email!" ????????
This GP from New Zealand signs up for EVERYTHING under my gmail account. A handful of it spam, but mostly important stuff - notifications for financial transactions make up most of the mails I receive.
I have called his offices repeatedly to try to discuss it with him, and even have a reasonable rapport with his secretary, but he never wants to take my calls.
I really cannot figure out why he does it.
Had first.last@comcast.net, but migrated to gmail and had to use something else. Then they misremember and hand out first.last@gmail.com.
You can set up a filter for the incorrect version of your email address (any email to namenodot@gmail.com) and get those out of your inbox.
Still waiting for them to contact me at the email _they_ used, to ask for their money back. I have no way of contacting them as the sender info is hidden.
I had a bank account I thought I had closed, but hadn't. Finally noticed and closed it 10+ years later. We moved around a lot.
Deleted Comment
https://xkcd.com/1279/
So here's where it gets weird/dumb: the kid replies to my friend and his parents and says, "hey mom, you put the wrong email address on my application, there's no dot in mine."
So my coworker, being the only tech savvy person on the thread replies. "Well, actually, [...]" and explains how dots are(n't) handled in Gmail address. Then the parents then reply and write, "but that's your old Gmail address, we had to get you a new one when we moved to Florida."
At this point my coworker gave up and the kid presumably lost his scholarship because his family didn't know you could keep your Gmail address when you moved houses.
(If you're reading this, hi Jake H.!)
I get so much misdirected mail that I don’t even try to help these people.
I hope John gets to his zoom interview for Deputy Chief of Police later today, because I’m not going to tell him about it.
For the first few years I tried to be kind and alert the sender, but it just became impractical to do so.
It breaks my heart when I see my name twin receiving state benefit notifications or HR notices at the wrong address. He's currently applying for quite a few electrician openings. Good luck, my man.
I know this because I'm frequently getting mail from automated systems for something they filled out.
I mean, I know there's an xkcd about this, but seriously? How do you mistype your own email address so often? In both cases, their real addresses are [first-name][last-name].
In understanding what went wrong here, it's worth noting that historically it was more common to have your email service provided by your ISP. If you moved to a house that wasn't served by the same ISP, your new ISP provided email bundled with the rest of the service at no extra charge, and you didn't want to keep paying to retain your old email, there were circumstances under which a move of house might have motivated a change of email.
Of course this was never relevant to gmail, but it might have been a part of the reason for the confusion. Or it might very well not have.
The law here is that once you have it, you can keep it when changing providers at no cost, they have to make it available to you.
I always found it weird, especially when you have so much choice of provider-free ones (less in France than in other countries but still)
Didn't your colleague forward the information ?
I personally find this Gmail feature (as well as the ability to append +anything to your email address) extremely useful.
Websites are pretty good at verifying email addresses these days. The real world, not so much. The super funny part is when you try to ask the bank/doctor/etc. to stop sending someone else's personal info to your email address, and they tell you they can't make that change since you aren't the account owner.
When John Smith signs up for an account using JohnSmith@gmail.com (or John.Smith@gmail.com), and the company trusts John Smith to have provided the email address accurately, three parties are affected: Both John Smiths and the company itself. Yes, verifying email address creates a bit more signup friction, but the consequences of getting it wrong way outweigh that friction for the privacy risk and confusion it causes (unless all the company cares about is a meaningless sign-up metric).
1. They send this information (order details, name, address, tracking numbers, receipt) without requiring a confirmation email. In fact, in their system the email on the other guy's account is labeled "unverified".
2. The emails contain no way to stop future emails. There's no "unsubscribe", "this is not me", "contact us", etc. Every link is to an Amazon page which expects the user to be logged in to the correct account.
3. The system does not sufficiently lock old accounts when the account email is reused. One suggestion from Amazon was to create a new account using my email, which should lock the other account. This did not happen, so now there are two accounts able to send Amazon emails to me with no way to tell them apart.
4. The Amazon website doesn't verify the user's account before displaying order details. If I click on a link from the other person's order return (or other types of links), Amazon opens up to my account but displays information from their order. It's confusing to see someone else's "refund status" alongside my account name on the official Amazon.com site.
5. Getting this fixed is a pain in the ass. I call, they say they'll fix it. I call, they suggest something else. I call, they escalate, try something else again. I chat, can't be handled over chat, they call me, try another thing. I'm not sure why they won't remove the email from his account or contact him and ask him to remove it.
I'm still getting credit card statements from an Indian bank. I can confirm the PDF password is easily cracked :)
https://jameshfisher.com/2018/04/07/the-dots-do-matter-how-t...
I do not know if this has been mitigated.
Netflix could make this mistake with postal addresses even, if for some reason they used postal addresses. You get a letter from Netflix, you don't notice it's addressed to Eve, who had stupidly written your address instead of hers, you pay for her Netflix.
This is a data protection violation, data processors have a duty to take reasonable care that the personal information they have about data subjects is correct. If you need it, make sure it's accurate. If you don't need it, don't collect it.
Netflix has zero idea how any particular email operator mangles or maps inboxes to actual users. Apple's private email service maps all sorts of inboxes to the same actual person. Mailinator maps every address to everyone.
It's a screencast tool- but instead of putting a video of your face in the corner, it overlays/ghosts your face on top of the full screen you're sharing.
Now sure how well it would work in practice. Maybe it's too distracting.
But it looks like a neat thing to try.
Also in the email name part of the email address, anything after + (plug sign) and before the @ (at sign) don't matter either. [1] This is the same behavior for personal Gmail and GSuite email (Gmail for enterprises)
[1]: https://gizmodo.com/how-to-use-the-infinite-number-of-email-...
You can do this for a wide variety of things and combine it with filters to get a lot of extra value from your email.
Ever since I got a basic Gsuite plan and set up a catch-all email address, I can just use websitename@mydomain and then use filters which is oh so practical!
This is supported by icloud and fastmail too.
No, this is neither supported nor not supported by any email provider - it is part of the email specification. It works that way with all email systems, unless they are non-RFC compliant.
It is not a part of RFC5322, RFC2822 or RFC822 - nothing in those RFCs establish any particular semantics of local-part (the part before "@"), and in terms of syntax IIRC those RFCs only defines the escaping rules (backslashes, quotes, etc).
RFC5233 mentions the established practice of using a separator character that splits local-part into "user" and "detail" pieces, but does not standardize any particular syntax for the separator (it cites "+" and "#" as possible examples). Moreover, this RFC is about Sieve language, and it is out of its scope to define such standard for email addresses.
RFC3696 mentions "user+mailbox@example.com" but does not define any semantics, merely citing this as an example of a valid email address, then going to how it must be escaped in a mailto: URL.
It is completely up to a particular provider to implement (or not) any subaddressing syntax and any logic related to it. No email specification I'm aware of makes this a requirement. (It's not like I've read every email RFC thoroughly, though, so I could be missing something.)
The dots are probably more reliable, but are not as flexible. The best you could do is a secret code for yourself.
Been getting his bank statements, his amazon orders, class emails, share purchases/sales.
Its a joke.
Edit: been happening for around 5 years.
Its also entertaining at the same time to see what he's doing on another continent. I'm torn, dammit Google!
My address is [first initial][last name]@gmail so anyone with a first name that starts with the same letter as mine and the same last name (which, there are SO MANY).
I get;
job offers family photos (I typically respond letting these people know they're not getting through to whoever they're intending) verizon bills (I'm also a verizon customer and they absolutely refuse to take my email off of the other two accounts - I've also texted both accounts since they're numbers have come through various times in the correspondences and they don't even acknowledge my communication let alone update their accounts - they're always late on their payments, but have the newest iPhone's all the time :D) purchase receipts from so many retailers I don't keep track (some of these people have real silly amounts of money) auto purchase receipts bank emails lease offers (just today I had to respond to a leasing agent who was trying to let someone know they got a place they were trying to rent in NYC for crazy money)
It's mind blowing to me how many people get their email address wrong and miss so many important emails, seemingly without ever realizing it.