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@.

99.9% chance no one would care. But people do freak out over this stuff.

Knew one guy that saw that a Bank got hacked on the news. Did an nslookup or similar to check the banks site.

He was arrested the next day and expelled from college for hacking the bank.

Eventually all got cleared up, but screwed up a year of his life

Do you mean nmap?

   M

In the old days, when I ran my own mail server, I used to enjoy rejecting them with custom SMTP 550 messages.

Now I can't do that so I hard to resort to bothering the poor folks at abuse@.

In my defense, they have emailed me from 3 or so different domains/services, so I've had to set up a filter more than once.

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

But yes your right, 6 characters is the minimum of "open" gmail accounts. I know of at least a dozen 2 character accounts created by insiders though.

At the time, I thought about pestering my Google-employee friends, but decided to just suck it up.

I have nothing to add, except that you made me smile on a Friday afternoon.

Anyway, I designed a badge called "I broke Gmail" that would get applied to anybody that did exactly that. I intended a hint of shame but I got a wall of emails asking to get it with explanations of how each had broken the service at some point.

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 personal favorite was a contract offer to play for a minor league baseball team in the Midwest a few summers back.

I also once got hired by the National Park Service for what sounded like a nice gig as a park ranger.

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.

It's the same guy, who works in a Eastern European country, where I emigrated from.

The first instance, he was asking his supervisor to use his vacation time so he and family could make a trip to Mecca for Hajj. I chuckled and ignored it.

Second time random picture of some massive metal parts from what looked like some factory he works at.

Third time was this year, very recently and I received a pretty unnecessarily detailed email about how he had to turn back home because he had soiled himself while driving to work... That one made me worry he had gotten Covid.

I guess I'm this guy's boss now.

But yea, 5 characters. I was an early gmail SRE so I was able to circumvent the restrictions. =)

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.

I’m not at all careful to keep my email address hidden on the internet either.

It never occurred to me that it might be due to being on a custom domain. I figured either I was just lucky, or that there’s less spam these days.

Tip: configure a catch-all to your email address, and use custom email addresses for every website. I love having e.g. [email protected] and being able to filter out bad email addresses whenever they become tiresome.

I've also configured Mailgun on the domain (not what it was intended for but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) so whenever I need to send an outgoing email from one of my custom addresses, I use their SMTP credentials.

At this point, I've been me@ amin@ heyamin@ and even [email protected].

My GMail spam folder has around 10-15 messages in it per day. My inbox is nearly always fine. The nice thing that GMail does is sort promotional emails that it doesn't judge to be outright spam under the "Promotions" category, which I don't see unless I seek it out. That one still isn't that bad, on the order for 10 per day, but it is genuinely stuff I don't care to see.

If I were to move away from GMail (which is on my todo list), I'd have to figure out what to do about those. Likely they mostly have unsubscribe links; after a quick scroll down the list, I think it's nearly all from companies that I do have or had an existing relationship with.

I wish GMail had an "unsubscribe" button so I don't have to hunt through emails for their often-hidden unsubscribe link. Yes, I could click Spam and then "Unsubscribe + Mark Spam", but I really want just "Unsubscribe", but that's not an option.

I do have a fairly uncommon last name, so it's not something that spammers might accidentally put in a word list to use as an email domain, but overall I've just mostly not cared about "protecting" my email address, and it's mostly not been a problem. Is this entirely atypical? If so, I wonder why...

At one point I decided to actually hit the unsubscribe links rather than just archiving these emails. Turns out I was subscribed to nearly 200 different mailing lists. But there were only 1 or 2 that wouldn't let me unsubscribe.

I keep dedicated email addresses for most purposes, and the two that are getting any are a random mailing list, and the kickstarter address. That one has been caught in a vortex of spam, clearly meaning that kickstarter can't keep their mouths shut about customer emails.

Most of it goes to:

* admin@<mydomain>.com - listed in whois publicly for a few years, understandable

* <dropbox's address>@<mydomain.com> - started coming in 2014, the fact they were breached only became properly known in 2016.

* <my first name>@<mydomain.com> - This is the actual email address I give to in person contacts. Not quite sure how it ended up on spam lists, my best guesses are from a recruiter sharing it, git commits (though the fact the address I use way more commonly for git isn't there indicates probably not) or someone just figured it out.

I gave up on Gmail for all the same reasons as the stories in this thread.

> 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. [email protected]

Unfortunately some services won’t accept that as a valid address.

The worst example of "we know what are valid email addresses better than anyone" case was when adidas.com decided that they'd redesign their registration flow and in the process disabled logins with "invalid" email addresses when they previously had accepted registrations and logins with email addresses tagged with + for years. That was genius.

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 [email protected]

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.

What I HAVE noticed is that it's usually transcription error. These people that share my name are writing down their email with a pen and paper and a secretary or transcription service is inputting it incorrectly. Lately I reply back to hotel confirmations asking for a complimentary hotel upgrade with lots of extra soap in the room.

If my email is [email protected], his is [email protected].

You'd think 10 years would be enough time to learn the difference, but nope.

A group of students included my email address in their project discussion. They ignored my emails asking to remove my address. So I started replying as if I was a part of their project, but requested/suggested slightly stupid things. They figured it out real fast after that.

If you have the person's actual email, CC him on all that. If not, include a note saying your a different John Doe and to please remind the John Doe they want to reach, to use his own email address.

I've marked most of them as Spam at this point, so hopefully Gmail's filters are simply learning to automatically send anything in Spanish to my Spam folder.

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 [email protected] 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 "[email protected]" 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 [email protected], but migrated to gmail and had to use something else. Then they misremember and hand out [email protected].

You can set up a filter for the incorrect version of your email address (any email to [email protected]) 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 did this once when someone created a Facebook account using my address. I let it go for a year and then did a password reset and deletion. At the time there was no requirement for email verification so the account was fully functional. Again, this is Facebook's responsibility to verify new accounts. A confirmation email link is last century's technology.

Moreover, what happens if this doppelganger is committing crimes via said account and investigators track you down from the email. It is in your best interest to eliminate these accounts. Kindly explaining the situation to non-existent customer support will get you nowhere.

IANAL but I don't think it works like that. Ownership is not the same as control.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003

Yeah, no. Peace out dude, I'm done here.

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.

But without a confirmation process to verify correct emails, this will continue as a fact of life, just like wrong phone numbers in the last generation, and wrong postal addresses in the gen before that.

https://xkcd.com/1279/

If you took it literally that would imply the actual email address is a single letter @gmail.com and although some ex-SRE people and others at Google have said there were ways to get short addresses for employees, nobody has suggested a single letter would be available even for them. For normal users the minimum was six characters.

But yea your right about the plus I guess Ii didn't read it detailed enough.