Hah. I have josephg@gmail. I sometimes wake up to threads of 6+ password reset attempts over an hour from someone who doesn’t know their own email address. For a couple years I got pay stubs. And monthly cell phone invoices from India.

I think that email address gets more email for other people than email for me at this point.

Same. Flights trips -- including PNR. Invoices. School reports. Tons of telephone bills. Frequent Uber trips (somewhere in Africa, for some reason). The list goes on and on. And my email address is short but not that common, but still get hit a few times per week.

It really drives me crazy that none of them have any type of email confirmation before accepting an email address as valid.

Because many people are not great at entering their email addresses correctly and many sites don't require any sort of address verification/confirmation.

If you have a common word or common name email address at a big email provider then you almost certainly are getting: password reset emails, billing invoices/order confirmations, tax info, childcare/education notices, medical appointment confirmations, local government notices, business conversations, wedding invitations, etc.

All legitimate and not spam but intended for a different recipient.

Someone signing up with a wrong email

Another source that are common are emails entered in on physical point of sale devices

my wife gets these regularly. there's a few people in the UK (we're in the US) that have similar gmail addresses as hers, and use her email address often. she'll get restaurant reservation notices, dr appt confirmations, tv repair schedule confirmations, delivery notices, etc. She's called the vendors a couple of times, and also called the people directly a a couple times. "You've entered your email wrong, please stop using my email".

One person, one time, understood the situation, thanked her, and updated things. And a year later, we got email for them. There's lots of mischief we could get up to, if so inclined, but we're not like that.

Someone last year accused her of 'hacking' in to their computer and stealing emails, so she's basically given up. But these people are missing their dr appointments, delivery change notifications, etc. And by 'these people', I'm meaning - it's perhaps 4 other people with slight variations of the same spelling.

This is a frequent occurrence for anyone with a common name.

https://xkcd.com/1279