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. =)