I have a gmail account like this. One day, I got an email confirmation for a rental car reservation. A few months later, I got an email about repair costs for the car. A few months after that, a collection agency emailed me...

Maybe because this was all in Europe, when I said "you have the wrong email address," the agency actually replied that I was right, and I never heard from them again.

People have signed up for Skype and Instagram accounts with my email address.

I've gotten an email intended for my brother.

I get notifications from a pharmacy for a 60+ year old Dutch woman.

I got a hotel booking confirmation with enough information in it to manage the reservation. An ex-colleague works for the OTA who sent it, so I mentioned it and said they need to validate emails. He knew about the problem, and it's somewhere in their backlog.

Validate email addresses, people! There are hidden customer service and legal costs if you don't.

Yeah so much this

I wonder how many people think that if they're called "John Smith" that Google will a) just make the email for them and b) that they're the only John Smith around the town/state/country

And even if you validate, what'll most likely happen is that people will still type the wrong email then get angry the system didn't guess their correct email

sigh

At least my name is pretty rare, but I've occasionally gotten emails to some with the same first name (think company LDAP email completion)

I'm in exactly the same boat. I was around when Microsoft launched Outlook.com email addresses and managed to snag [email protected]. I have a very common english name.

I received private emails from all over the world. When I started I'd reply to each one to explain the situation, but it all became too much and now I just delete it or create filters to send it to junk.

I discovered a distant relative in Ireland because he signed up for job alerts with my email address. Fortunately one of them sent the offer that had his resume embedded in it, so I called him and we had a chat, five minutes later I'm speaking to his 81 year old Nan about her grandfather's brother who moved to Australia.

I've also received Amazon gift cards on the US Father's day. I emailed Amazon every time saying it's a mistake and they should refund it, but they refuse to because the recipient isn't allowed to refuse the gift card only the orderer can change the order.

Your first paragraph was so lovely to hear.

Reminds me of the couple that lives on a farm that is the default geolocation for 600 million IP addresses. Their farm has been visited by authorities for a long time.

https://consumerist.com/2016/04/11/this-farm-in-kansas-is-th....

And in my work, we always know the direction to null island, because stray robots will head right for it. I even thought about writing a short story about all the stray / bugged out robots piling up on the seafloor near it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island

Your first link it broken. I think you meant to link https://consumerist.com/2016/04/11/this-farm-in-kansas-is-th...

Or if you connecting from Europe https://archive.is/Kvgzm

This one is a better article imo https://splinternews.com/how-an-internet-mapping-glitch-turn...

Not just authorities, but wackos who think the residents living there hacked them, etc, etc...

I have something similar. So imagine you have johnsmith.com as a domain name. And then someone with the same name gets johnasmith.com (there's an a in there for a middle initial). And they use [email protected] but they and probably others keep missing the "A" in the middle since it's easy to miss. I have email for my domain forwarded to me and the amount of email I get is staggering.

I've talked with the guy via e-mail and he is nice and all so I used to forward them to him but he's never gotten many of them fixed after I asked multiple times so I've stopped.

There is another guy with the same name as me with a similar gmail as mine and I've gotten pretty sensitive emails for him from lawyers, bill collectors, etc. I generally let the senders know in those cases but the rest I ignore.

So yeah, many times it's ineptitude.

I'm kind of surprised in this case, though, why so many restaurants send out food without a credit card or some other method to pay in advance. 9 years ago when it started most just took it on faith and sent food out but pretty much everyone requires pre-payment nowadays.

I share my name with someone who lives in Florida. Actually his first name is spelled differently, but mine is the common variant in English speaking countries.

So from time to time I receive emails directed to him. I know he studied at Miami Dade college, did an exchange year in Venezuela, got a job as a waiter, then switched to multi-level marketing (I almost wanted to email him and suggest to reconsider his career choices). One time I got asked to register to a payroll service and enter my bank account information to receive ACH transfers.

By the way, it's spelled fiancee if that's a she.

I have the same problem but it has gotten worse. Before I was tracking this guys as he moved from one country to another before settling in Canada. I knew when he got married. His wife mistaken my email address as well. And as he changed his email address to another service, I was receiving his email on that service too.

And then it got worse. Several people coming of adult age started to use my address. First it started out as college papers and then it went to career searches. And now shopping and banking. I don't know who these people are so I can't forward them the emails. But I have gotten their international phone numbers.

It is spelled fiancée if that's a she.

I'm a French speaker, thanks. I'm not expecting someone who obviously lives in the US to care enough and input an é, unless the auto-correct does it for you maybe.

You're confusing the (French, I think?) word "fiancée" with the English word "fiancee" derived from it; English uses the 26-character latin alphabet for words. Compare "resume" versus "résumé" or "sushi" versus (IIRC) "すし" or "the" versus "þe" (showing that basic syntax words are not exempt from this).

Nope. For example, any issue of the New Yorker is replete with uses of diaresis (see eg https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-...), and the OED does list fiancé; née and naïve are also pretty common; I was taught to spell words that had ligatures (eg hæmatology, œsophagus) at school...though I'm ancient. Wikipedia has more examples of this kind of orthography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_terms_with_diacritical... ... (yes I know this is 'just' wikipedia, but it links to more references on the topic)

> At one point, her husband used my fiance's email to register a bank account. We called the bank and after explaining the situation were able to CORRECT the email address for her (we decided that a bank account was serious enough to fix it rather than just be annoyed).

Heh, someone else managed to attach their PayPal account to my email address, and there's no way for me to disavow or remove it.

Thankfully, I've never been able to recover their password because PayPal requires more user information that I don't know.

Unfortunately that also means that I'll never be able to create a PayPal account with that email address.

PayPal does allow the "+" suffix for the user part, so you could do [email protected] and the mails they send will end up at [email protected] (it's part of RFC 2822, and it works for Yahoo, GMail (I've tried both), apparently outlook.com, and maybe others: https://www.ghacks.net/2013/09/17/can-now-use-email-aliases-... ).

When I moved countries, PayPal didn't let me change my country of residency, so now I have a user+[2 letter country code]@domain for the PayPal account in the new country. For IKEA it was a bit more silly because they seem to have several customer-facing systems, and 1 system worked fine but another didn't like this concept (I couldn't log in)...

I have been receiving emails from HDFC bank intended for someone else. And I've never even been to India.

Its all sorts of email like OTP and statements and other stuff.

The email always comes from [email protected], so I haven't been able to report about it either.

I have this same weird problem. Fifteen years ago when I was in college, my friends gave me a nickname, which was a combination of an obscure movie and obscure song title and my first name. As near as I could tell, this was a completely new word. A search for the nickname revealed nothing, I was able to register [email protected] (when Gmail came along), and nickname.com/.net/org. I registered AIM accounts, Yahoo accounts, ICQ accounts all with that name. Everything I did online was that moniker, and I was the only person using it as near as I could tell.

Since then, other people have either come in contact with it or arrived at the same conclusion, and now I get e-mails for [email protected] in particular one individual-- I get business e-mails for him (he seems to be a graphic designer), he registered his Netflix account under my e-mail (which I promptly closed). For years I got his power bills electronically, as well as other spammy ephemera that's directed at him.

I am not being hacked. Nobody is using my CC information or accessing my e-mail. I cannot for the life of me figure out what chain of incompetency has lead to me repeatedly getting this individuals personal e-mails.

This is a great reason to not have gmail/yahoo/outlook/hotmail addresses: It's really hard to accidentally send an email to my domain. And people misentering my address are very unlikely to hit another valid one.

You'd be surprised. There is a Texas law firm whose domain is my domain name + "law". Guess who receives a significant portion of their "confidential" messages and inquiries?

totally agree. but it is also sooo convienient as a junk mail address for signups.

Just like biometrics aren't a password but are a good user ID, I have a couple different email address that I use for very different purposes that involve different exposure. My work email never has anything not work related, my personal email rarely gets ads and I prune it aggressively...my gmail looks like a syphilitic brain and I don't mind because I know what it is.

I do that in a fine-grained way with my personal domain: I receive mail addressed to any user at the domain. I never give out the same address twice. I can filter mail based on the "To" field, and always know how senders ultimately got my address. It works out because spammers never send mail to random other users at the same domain; I think trying unconfirmed users would be a quick way to get themselves blocked by common spam filters.

A fun thing I found this way: Samsung won't let you sign up for an account if the string "samsung" appears in your email address. Must be annoying for [email protected]!

I have a dedicated, very generic sounding domain name just for signups.

I use a custom email for each service. Like [email protected] for Amazon, xyz.ycombinator@... and so on.

All email is forwarded to a single catch-all account from a good provider, so it is just as convenient to use.

But it is trivial to isolate what emails came from which service, who has leaked my email to spammers, to just block a individual recipient, ... . It also makes it easy to have multiple accounts without the annoyance of a fallback email.

I wish I had switched to this method much earlier.

Ideally that domain would be used by at least a few hundred people to prevent associating via domain name though, with different prefixes (see xyz above) for each user.

For over a decade I've used hushmail's aliasing feature which allows you to create such custom emails (e.g. [email protected]) on the fly almost instantaneously. I use one per service that requires an email to sign up. Works great.

You can do it with the free account, too.

Just delete one if you are obviously getting spam because of a service selling their email lists. Which is a reality for "free" services. Bonus points because you can identify exactly who it is that is doing this and have the option of publicly shaming them.

I do this too and it’s great except for services that use the reply-to/from as a requirement for service emails.

Not really. I have started moving my emails from Gmail to my last name based domain and have already received a few emails meant for others - and this is a domain that I've had for many years.

There was a doctor up North who kept confusing my gmail address for his own. I would frequently get invited to speak at medical conferences, invited to weddings, stock tips. Regular sort of thing. I made generally polite requests to keep this at bay, and for the most part it took care of it until the next time.

I did finally lay waste to the problem when he decided that the prepaid Verizon phone he set up for his mistress needed to be associated with my account.

My gmail address is simply my last name. (I got it early). I get all sorts of things from other people with that last name. I've received things like cancer diagnoses (!) back before there were laws in place to protect medical records. Yesterday I got a shipment tracking for gold, noting the anticipated date and time it would arrive. (I could probably wait in front of the house and sign for it!)

Same thing with Yahoo for me. My last name is too short for gmail, though.

My last name also happens to be shared with the name of a large multi-national manufacturer. For some bizarre reason I get semi-regular emails looking for support help from customers of theirs in Iran. No other countries, just Iran. I also get e-mails from people that work for the company in India with photos of their company picnic. This happens about every other year although it's possible I've missed a few. I don't really use the account anymore.

They at least seem to throw a nice company picnic.

I've got a custom domain that's very similar to a law office & the owner of the law office and I have the same name, so I often get emails from the courthouse, clients, other lawyers, etc who must have written his email address down (he appends `law` to the end of the domain, while I do not).

I'm very frequently forwarding these messages and saying "I've deleted this on my personal account", but they don't seem to stop - has been happening for years. Seems like something he would want fixed.

One time, I even responded to another lawyer to tell him and he thought I was the intended owner and started riffing with me over email!

In my gmail double life, I'm a falconer, a long-haul truck driver, and like to go on pilgrimages to Scottish golf clubs and to the holy land.

Gmail ignoring a '.' character in the email address has resulted in some interesting situations for me. Someone registered for an Amazon account with a version of my email address that was only a '.' different from mine to use a gift card, so all of the email came to me.

The number of places that let you register for an account without verifying the email address is huge.

I used to be kind of embarrassed that I didn't get myname@gmail. Was already taken in most ways. So,I made up a name I thought would fit in with some books I was reading.

In retrospect, I think I got very lucky in that. Makes spotting many sources of spam so much easier.

Similarly, having a phone number that is not a local one is amazing in cutting down bad calls.

Confused by the last sentence :) Isn't a phone number local somewhere? I had an out of state number for years. Just got cold calls from the other state.

Yes, so isn't it much easier for you to quickly identify a call as likely spam if it is from the "other state"? :)

Exactly this. I answer calls I know the numbers of, or ones from the area I live in. If it has the same area code as my phone, you can leave a message.

Ah, yes!

That reminds me slightly of https://gail.com/.

That's a classy webpage. It would have been too easy for them to plaster it with ads and make some passive income instead.

I don’t have a particularly common surname but used to get emails from a teacher in Alabama about her vacation days. In the end I managed to track her down at the school from google and asked her to update her email address on file, and haven’t heard anything since.

I also once got a hotel confirmation which I initially suspected might have been an attempt at misusing a cloned credit card, but that turned out later to be a simple mistake.

Incidentally the only time I have had my card cloned was in the ‘states, because they seem allergic to chip-and-pin, which has been the de facto standard in the uk (and Europe) pretty much since the turn of the millennium, and in the age of today’s health concerns, the use of contactless payments has seen a massive rise in popularity.

> My fiance got so frustrated with Walmart orders, amazon orders, bills, personal emails being sent to her that she tracked one lady down and called her.

I did that a year or so ago after I couldn't send the person a yard gnome for Christmas on the walmart account they set up using my e-mail. The billing notifications finally stopped on the one account I couldn't disable as they presumably paid off their industrial kitchen stove.

It was an interesting adventure tracking them down since I learned there are only three or four people in the (internet) world with my same first and last name...and a scary amount of information that can be found about people with just a little google-fu.

I have a [email protected] too with a reasonably uncommon South Asian name (+ unusual spelling).

I’ve received bank account registration emails, Income Tax registration details, and someone has even registered an Indian government biometric ID (Aadhar) with my email. Even elevator servicing invoices (one of these people is an apartment super, apparently).

Clearly many of these systems have bothered with email validation.

Sending polite emails to these organisations mostly hasn’t worked. The only time it has worked has been, oddly, the elevator company, because I emailed someone at their privacy team in their world HQ in Finland.

I have the same problem. I have a gmail account that is first initial + middle initial + last name. So if I were John Larry Doe it would be [email protected]. There's not a week that goes by without me getting email that is meant for someone else.

Receipts from purchases, I get signed up on email lists (why don't more require you to confirm your email?!?), and quite a few personal emails, such as invitations to birthday parties, etc. Every now and then I'll get something that is rather sensitive, like confidential legal or business documents.

I haven't had anyone angry at me, and most of the time I simply reply and tell the person that they have the wrong email address. I just really hate the lists I get signed up on.

I have tracked down a few people through Facebook because they bought a digital item that was delivered through email.

How could it possibly be stupidity. Let me list the reasons why.

This is multiple orders to multiple restaurants over a span of years. You are not going to have that many people all with a similar address and all making exactly the same mistake.

If you order pizza and it doesn't turn up then you are going to call again and ask where it is. At that point the mix up will be revealed and you will be more careful in future.

I am very surprised the police haven't investigated. If this is costing multiple restaurants hundreds of euros per order then it seems they would be quite insistent the police get involved. They would all have records of when those orders were received so I can't imagine it would be difficult to check call records to determine if the calls all came from the same number.

I have an email address that is every bit as silly as my username on HN (i.e. something that I didn’t think could ever be entered by accident), and yet a man named Sean from Michigan (I’m British) is signed up to AAA with my email.

I was actually able to Google the combined information included in the emails over the past couple of years to pin down the guy’s home address. I did consider sending a postcard explaining the situation, but balked at the idea in the end, in case it came off more creepy than lighthearted.

That would be reasonable IF he didn't add the detail about a friend also getting these deliveries. What are the chances of that coincidence?

Happens to me all the time. At this point I have 5 different peoples emails coming to my gmail.

One guy in New Zealand is a grip so I get a lot of filming schedules of movie locations/shoots and scripts.

I get Geico & Verizon bills and account updates for a guy called Judson (I'm Justin).

Another guy is a Teenager in Carolina so I get some dubious stuff for that one.

There were some others too but I auto filtered them to trash.

I get the tech issue, but what's interesting to me is that this person seems to be affected by delivery services that charge ON delivery, which to me points towards malicious intent. It would be interesting to know if the delivery people know the person's name. The article is a little fuzzy there.

The only way to stop it is to mess up anything that they do using your email that you have the power over.

That could go into illegal territory real quick though.

I've bumped into this one. There are two people who have close variations of my email address.

One is in Kansas City and mistakenly attached his power bill to my email. When I tried to notify them, they wanted to turn off the account entirely. I demanded they contact the person via the phone number on the account before making any changes.

The second recently purchased a house so I got all his closing docs. Even after notifying the real estate agent listed and the title company, I still got a few confirmations.

Same here. I have gotten everything in emails, but I don't live in the same location as my similarly named cohorts.

Home Depot pickups, business invoices, Ticketmaster tickets, invitations to so many events, boat rides, cycling clubs...

I hate it too. You never know if it's someone that legit used a wrong email, or if it's some kind of phishing scam.

I have a common name gmail and almost every week I get a dating site, ebill, job offer, riot invite, party invite. It’s pretty funny how many sites work without confirming email.

Identity is one of the hardest things to wrestle with in cyberspace. Authenticating identity is tough business.

How can your fiance's email be associated to that lady's Amazon account? Doesn't your fiance has an Amazon account linked to her own email already?

If it's a gmail account the lady's email and fiance could be jane.smith vs janesmith and still go to the same inbox.