Even worse, I have a <lastname>@gmail.com address. I have gotten everything from multiple years of tax form from New South Wales to tickets to a wine tasting in South Africa. One of the most fun was church choir info from Germany.
At this point I have a multilingual "You have the wrong address" email that I will send once and then create a rule with an auto-reply and auto-delete.
I have <fistname>.<lastname>@gmail.com and I get an eerily similar combination of mistaken emails. There's a real estate agent in New Jersey and a church deacon in Ireland that really wish they had my email address, apparently.
My gmail address isn't even [email protected], but 3 initials repeated twice. Looks pretty cryptic, and still I get random mail for other people. A recent one involving an attempt to hire a CTO, Netflix notifications for a Spanish or Portuguese Netflix account, and a bunch of other random stuff.
It's amazing how sloppy people can be with email addresses.
In the last 5 years, I can recall situations where entering my email address led to:
- At least three instances where a multiple people abandoned a new job onboarding due to use of my email address. (In Scotland, Texas and Ireland)
- One instance where someone was leaking sensitive PII and video regarding a workplace incident that killed someone.
- Multiple dressing room / bedroom "how do i look" emails.
- One person sent an email every quarter with a zip file containing a VPN client and a word document with a list of about a dozen username, passwords, etc for the industrial facility that she was a plant safety manager.
- One guy test drives luxury cars in the Washington DC region as a hobby.
- An attorney sent a bunch of litigation related materials to his client. And a bunch of followups to get signatures as deadlines were missed.
- One guy was a big Ashley Madison user
- Lots of real estate agents in weird disjointed conversations.
This stuff has nothing to do with information warfare. Just simple mistakes compounded by complete inattention to detail and often combined with incredibly stupid or irresponsible behavior.