WOW! I was also an early adopter of Gmail and have a six-letter gmail address as well that I got all sorts of emails that were from other people (but with the same name as mine). In inspecting the raw email content, the "To:" field is correctly spelled with my gmail address but the email content have been nothing to do with me: someone else's group invite, account registration that was clearly not me, flight confirmation emails, hotel booking confirmation emails, bills, work related emails and etc. You name it.

Is this a widespread issue with Gmail?

Yes. Heaven help you if you have an extremely common firstname.lastname combination where there are multiple spellings of the first name. Once you're in someone's address book, it's nearly impossible to get them to delete you if they're not tech-savvy. So every time someone intends to email [email protected] they send it to John.Smith instead.

There are companies that have been emailing me contracts for years now. I've gotten multiple divorce records, tax returns, all sorts of confidential information. I guess that's what all those legal disclaimers in the footer are for, because someone could do a ton of damage with the information I've gotten.

Those legal disclaimers in the email footers are not binding.

(I am not a lawyer.)

I'm part of some family's mailing list. They seem to go on fun vacations each year.

Some woman has a gmail account that seems to be [first initial][middle initial][last name]@gmail.com, but she wound up on her synagogue's leadership mailing list as [first initial][last name]@gmail.com, which is my email address.

Until somebody finally listened to my responses of "These aren't the droids you're looking for", I was privy to lots of intriguing drama.

yep, I also have a 6 letter gmail address and I get a ton of stuff. It's a nightmare. I have utility bills, at some point I was on a mailing list for some real estate company, I even got people complaining to me about their broken A/C units. Several cable accounts with multiple providers in multiple US states are registered on my account and there is nothing I can do about it because the companies don't give a damn or the support people received the worst training.

Sometimes it's funny because people send me Mails trying to recover their account but I tell them to speak to the companies because I have no way of verification that I'm actually turning over something to the right party, so I don't do it.

widespread enough that there's an xkcd about it:

https://xkcd.com/1279/

I have a 7-letter gmail address. Middle initial (I don't use my first name), last name. Every so often I'll get information mailed to me that's supposed to reach Terry Myname in Illinois, Tim Myname in Iowa, Tammy Myname in Florida, Todd Myname in Wisconsin, etc. A lot of times it's just mundane (oooh, I could cancel someone's Bath & Body Works order!) but on occasion it's legal paperwork.

I do at least try to get the important ones sorted out -- I reply with "it appears you're trying to reach [name] in [city] but you've actually reached [me] in [my city]. If you have a phone number for [name], you should give them a call and ask for their correct e-mail address." On occasion that even works :D

Same here, also on a 6 character gmail address.

I regularly get people applying for loans, who send me A LOT of personal information, because of a typo in a spam mail. Contacting the responsible loan company, who looks pretty fake and shady, didn't lead to any success.

Once had a gentlemen in his 70ies contact me about my profile on a dating site for seniors and get lots of car advertisement addressed to someone with my initials, who sometimes does eBanking, is 40+ years married to a wife whoms father died 3 years ago, etc. etc.

Needless to say, I love mail filters.