I have a common name, also a name used by a huge construction firm. I own [email protected] and firstnamelastname.com . There is no hope for these people. I have tried everything under the sun to get them to give out the correct email address.

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.

Yeah that's not going to help. I've got a guy using my email address for close to a decade. When it started, he was a high school student ordering lacrosse equipment. More recently he was buying a house -- I received the contract.

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.

That's when you start embarassing the person.

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.

You'd think so, but nope! In addition to the fact that about half the emails are in Spanish (my doppelganger appears to be a Central American doctor?), all of them seem to contain the bare minimum of info that would allow me to actually contact the person in question. And, ya know, you'd think a hotel or a financial institution that is notified they have someone other than the actual customer's email on file would be quick to correct that, yet so far I have never received so much as an acknowledgement from anyone that they will correct their records and try to seek out the account holder by other means.

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.

Have you tried emailing them? You have their email address apparently ;)