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I have been getting financial emails from several people for many years at my GMail ID. They apparently have given my address but without the dot. But what mys

I have been getting financial emails from several people for many years at my GMail ID. They apparently have given my address but without the dot. But what mystifies me is how these people keep going for years without ever realising they aren't getting account transaction emails (from their banks), notifications of stock trades, even OTP emails etc. How is it possible for people to use these services for years without ever wondering why they aren't getting the routine emails they're supposed to get or even why they aren't getting the OTP email they had generated? Also none of the institutions I contacted to ask their clients to update their correct email bothered to do so. On the contrary they sent me back what looked like automated replies asking if their customer service was satisfactory. At this point I'm sorely tempted to delete my email and start over with another service provider. The nuisance of having to delete almost a dozen emails not meant for you every single day is annoying to say the least. At least with spam you get it sent to spam folder and there it stays. Confidential emails not meant for you is awkward and uncomfortable to have to put up with.

tzs 6y ago
> But what mystifies me is how these people keep going for years without ever realising they aren't getting account transaction emails (from their banks), notifications of stock trades, even OTP emails etc. How is it possible for people to use these services for years without ever wondering why they aren't getting the routine emails they're supposed to get or even why they aren't getting the OTP email they had generated? 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).
ses1984 6y ago
Set up a filter? Did you ever try to contact the institution where the emails come from?
- Santosh83 6y ago
  Yes, I do have it filtered. And yes, contacted all the institutions. They don't bother at all in updating their records. And these are banks and other financial institutions. One would think they'd take the integrity of their data more seriously.
  - mwexler 6y ago
    Yeah, this is a tough one. You can't just have random people saying "please change this email for another person" without permission, on one hand, but you violate other codes if it's clear you send med or financial info to the wrong people. That's why you get so little actual info in emails from bank and medicals these days. 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.
  - vidarh 6y ago
    Set it up to forward to their support e-mail addresses...
tyingq 6y ago
"they aren't getting account transaction emails (from their banks)" 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.
boogies 6y ago
> At this point I'm sorely tempted to delete my email and start over with another service provider. 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).
LatteLazy 6y ago
You can filter your gmail based on the TO field (so anything without the dot goes to spam) if you like. I've done the same thing myself intentionally: I give the dot-less version to sites/companies where I need to receive an email or two (account confirmation etc). Then I manually grab them from spam and then forget the whole thing knowing I'll never see the other crap they send me. Hope that helps, as someone with a common name I sympathize enormously.
- davidbarker 6y ago
  I've done this — I have a filter to move any email I receive without a dot into a "Not For Me" folder, which I periodically go through and usually send a canned response back about how they probably have the wrong person. 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".
- justusthane 6y ago
  You can also append “+whatever” to the username part of your gmail address and filter it that way. E.g. johndoe+mailinglist@gmail.com Unfortunately some services won’t accept that as a valid address.
  - godelski 6y ago
    Others strip it too
  - soulofmischief 6y ago
    And most email scrapers / aggregators these days also ignore the + and whatever comes after.
  - jonpurdy 6y ago
    I wrote about this issue on my blog. Basically just using email aliases on a custom domain to enable per-provider filtering, and deletion of the alias if they ignore unsubscribe requests or get hacked. https://jonpurdy.com/2020/06/using-email-aliasing-to-detect-hacks-and-protect-your-privacy/ https://jonpurdy.com/2020/06/using-email-aliasing-to-detect-...
AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
I've encountered the same problem. One day I'm going to stop being polite and cancel the Hotel Reservations, Conference Invites, and other shit that this guy keeps signing up for using my email address. Maybe that will get him to finally pay attention.
- RandomBacon 6y ago
  I imagine then you've probably gotten receipts/confirmations with the person's phone number. Have you tried calling him and letting him know?
  - AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
    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.
    - ovulator 6y ago
      Have you tried emailing them? You have their email address apparently ;)
  - shiftpgdn 6y ago
    I have a common name, also a name used by a huge construction firm. I own firstnamelastname@gmail.com 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.
wycy 6y ago
Reset their account passwords.
- eli 6y ago
  I’d rather not commit a federal computer crime thanks
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    They provided false credentials. The account is yours. 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.
    - dotBen 6y ago
      They provided false credentials. The account is yours. IANAL but I don't think it works like that. Ownership is not the same as control.
      - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
        Ownership was never established in the first place.
        dotBen 6y ago
        Sure it was. I create an account, accept the terms and condition and put in your email address, your phone number and your street address. It's still my account, I am the one that accepted the conditions (you would cry foul if you were bound by the conditions you didn't accept).
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
There's an xkcd for everything. Sure, that's probably my email address. https://xkcd.com/1279/ https://xkcd.com/1279/
- liquidgecka 6y ago
  Annoyingly that is different, everything after the + is _ignored_ so only one person can have <first>+<any lastname>@gmail.com. Other people I am guessing use first.lastname and that is where the confusion is. =)
  - tialaramex 6y ago
    The XKCD cartoon isn't talking about a literal plus symbol. 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.
    - liquidgecka 6y ago
      I created and removed several single letter emails as part of a test once, and I made several short names (mine, spam@, etc). The biggest problem was that too short would take the backend down because it received more mail than could be indexes at the time so too short or too common would get deleted to protect the system. As far as I know Randal still has his though. :-) But yea your right about the plus I guess Ii didn't read it detailed enough.
  - FabHK 6y ago
    The plus sign in the comic might just be meant to denote string concatenation (in other words, jsmith@gmail.com, not j+smith@gmail.com).
yakk0 6y ago
Same. The ones that surprise me are the credit card information or cell phone plans. I was able to contact the phone company and tell them to remove my address, but the credit card was an exercise in frustration. You can't get through without account or personal info. I just mark most of them as spam these days.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
  Forward the email with the explanation you've given to abuse@<sender>. Most companies should have someone monitoring such an inbox. If that doesn't work I'd call the desk of the cto or shame them on Twitter.
bitbang 6y ago
Same exact issue. Especially with people from Africa for some reason. I get a lot of stuff from 3 people from Kenya, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. Most everything there is managed by phone, and they just use my email as a throw-away address. The guy in South Africa has a collections agency after him. The guy in Kenya likes to order food delivery quite a bit. I occasionally change his order to extra spicy. 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. 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.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  I don't receive any junk mails anymore after switching to my custom domain.
  - justusthane 6y ago
    It’s weird, but that’s been my experience too. I switched off Gmail (where I got tons of spam, although most properly caught by the spam filter) several years ago, and have received fewer than 200 spam emails in total since switching. I know this because my new host won’t allow the personalized spam filter to be enabled until you’ve received 200 spam. 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.
    - timvdalen 6y ago
      I think you are lucky, I get around 5-10 spam mails on my custom domain daily. Granted, my address has been in a few data dumps.
agency 6y ago
Same exact situation here. I have {commonFirstName}.{commonLastName}@gmail.com and get so much legit email without the dot for other people with my name. There’s at least a few of them - a retired vet, a substitute teacher in Ireland, a middle school student in Montana. And just this week I got some from a bail bond place for a kid in Texas that included his picture. I don’t understand how these people aren’t constantly confused about not getting emails they expect
armoredkitten 6y ago
I get the same thing all the time. I think it's relatively common for people who signed up for Gmail early, and thus we able to get a bare named email (i.e., no numbers afterwards like john.doe420). 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.
iamthemonster 6y ago
I have a fairly common first name and last name and I thought I was a genius when I jumped onto an early gmail invitation in (I think) early 2005 to bag my "firstname.lastname@gmail.com". Now I realise I was a chump and should probably have just stuck with sexxiboi69@hotmail.com
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  > sexxiboi69@hotmail.com If you put that on your resume and they hire you, it's probably a good place to work.
fortran77 6y ago
My gmail address is simply my lastname @ gmail.com So I get a lot of emails meant for other people whose email is firstname.mylastname@gmail.com 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.
- linuxftw 6y ago
  Probably best you didn't. Unauthorized use of a computer system, even if you have the credentials, is considered hacking, at least in the US.
knorker 6y ago
I've sent a physical letter, when I got an electricity bill with a home address. A week later I got an apology email, and the incorrect emails stopped.
richard_g 6y ago
What's strange to me is why they thought that email address would work -- after all it's not their address. I've got years of emails from France for the same reason. You can set up a filter for the incorrect version of your email address (any email to namenodot@gmail.com) and get those out of your inbox.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Lots of people don't understand how the Internet really works, or realize that there might be another person with the name of the person they're trying to contact.
liquidgecka 6y ago
Been there. I posted about this before but I own a 5 character common first and last name @gmail.com address. I get misdirected emails _constantly_. 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. =/
- saagarjha 6y ago
  That poor councilman…
- jaredwiener 6y ago
  Likewise -- I fall firmly into this XKCD https://xkcd.com/1279/ https://xkcd.com/1279/ 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.
  - liquidgecka 6y ago
    Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beb8zCGMsbI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beb8zCGMsbI
  - fishtacos 6y ago
bluehatbrit 6y ago
I have the same but it seems to be one specific person in Canada (I'm in the UK). I started getting emails about college prospectuses and applications, then I started getting them about library fines. I tried to email the library and inform them that they had the wrong email address and got nothing back. The latest has been emails from a car dealership trying to confirm some options for a new car. 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.
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
Or, contact the legitimate recipient, and tell them to sue the bank.
- Tagbert 6y ago
  It’s very rare to have any other contact information for these people. It’s not like you can email them. :)
newtoday 6y ago
I've purchased a truck in Florida, been going to college in (I forget which state) for a few years now, opened an LLC AND filed for divorce with Legal zoom, was part of a venture partnership with multiple personal invite and discussion emails about investment meetings, and more! I've responded many times to these and the only replies are from the last one, and Legal zoom (who told me sorry, disregard it??)
wnevets 6y ago
I had someone open a bank account with my email and I called the bank thinking someone was stealing my ID or something. How do people not know their own email address?
- Izkata 6y ago
  I have someone using my email, who best guess doesn't understand Gmail and Twitter are two different things - they have the matching @name on Twitter.
coredog64 6y ago
Same, but my concern is that some day one of these people will convince Google support that they own my account and then I will really be hosed.
wyldfire 6y ago
> But what mystifies me is how these people keep going for years without ever realising they aren't getting account transaction emails 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."
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pc86 6y ago
> But what mystifies me is how these people keep going for years without ever realising they aren't getting account transaction emails (from their banks), notifications of stock trades, even OTP emails etc. Because they never received the first one, so it's not abnormal to miss the n emails after that.
- edgarvaldes 6y ago
  I think this is the real answer. For those people there is no disruption in communication, because it never begins in the first place.
beowulfey 6y ago
Why not filter? If you know you always use the dot, filter without the dot. It works for me when I tried to set it up. Can even blacklist certain senders specifically so that if there are a few out there you made without the dot you will still get them.
abfan1127 6y ago
I get a guy's bank info from the east coast of the US. Recently, he started using Zelle. His Zelle activity was being emailed to me. One of his Zelle recipients used a phone number. I was able to call her, get his phone number and tell him about this issue. He still hasn't updated his email address. I don't get it...
makr17 6y ago
Yep, I live with this too... I thought it luck that I got <my_last_name>@gmail.com early on, turns out it was a curse. It's not a _common_ last name, but people with the last name seem to assume it is theirs, or maybe people miss the other letters in addresses they are given and just use the last name? 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......
deathanatos 6y ago
> But what mystifies me is how these people keep going for years without ever realising they aren't getting account transaction emails 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…
- tialaramex 6y ago
  I get physical mail for a previous owner, even though I've lived here for five years. Usually I notice, I write "Not at this address" and cross through the address in Sharpie then shove it into a mailbox, per regulations. 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.
dripton 6y ago
My gmail doppleganger signs me up for mostly animal charities and religious stuff. I keep unsubscribing and marking as spam. Sometimes I wonder if she does this on purpose, giving a "fake email" to people she doesn't want to deal with. If so, Diane, there's a real person with that email, and quit throwing all your spam at me.
mikelward 6y ago
And that's why email senders need to do double opt-in.
mrcu5 6y ago
I'm confused. Do people just assume they can think of an email address and Google somehow knows and assigns it to them automatically? Like they're signing up for something and put in "santosh83@gmail.com" and think "My name is Santosh and I was born in '83. Google obviously knows this and will send me this email!" ????????
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  I can't see that being the case (except exceedingly rarely) but perhaps if they had "santosh83@live.com" on an MS device and then got a device with Google mail they think their address is now "santosh83@gmail.com"? Or they're just nuts ...
- emberfiend 6y ago
  If you ever figure out why people do this or what their thinking is, let me know, but yeah this actually happens. I have a common name but a long and uncommon surname, and I have name.surname@gmail.com. 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.
  - NiggaBytes 6y ago
    Is he in Auckland? If it's my GP I'll take it up with him for ya :P
- rhino369 6y ago
  Could be something like this: Had first.last@comcast.net, but migrated to gmail and had to use something else. Then they misremember and hand out first.last@gmail.com.
kadoban 6y ago
You can set up filters in gmail to either automatically go to a different folder ("label" they call it), or to just delete them. It's not hard at all once you get used to the interface, and there's a wide variety of rule options.
avel 6y ago
You get financial emails, I got about $1,200 through quickpay / zelle via my email address. 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.
tjpnz 6y ago
I share a name with a builder from Queensland and have been getting his email for years - loan applications, hardware receipts, updates about his rental properties, apprenticeship schemes - you name it. What's insane about it is how many people insisted they had the correct address when I used to follow up.

tzs 6y ago

> But what mystifies me is how these people keep going for years without ever realising they aren't getting account transaction emails (from their banks), notifications of stock trades, even OTP emails etc. How is it possible for people to use these services for years without ever wondering why they aren't getting the routine emails they're supposed to get or even why they aren't getting the OTP email they had generated? 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).

ses1984 6y ago

Set up a filter? Did you ever try to contact the institution where the emails come from?

Santosh83 6y ago
Yes, I do have it filtered. And yes, contacted all the institutions. They don't bother at all in updating their records. And these are banks and other financial institutions. One would think they'd take the integrity of their data more seriously.
- mwexler 6y ago
  Yeah, this is a tough one. You can't just have random people saying "please change this email for another person" without permission, on one hand, but you violate other codes if it's clear you send med or financial info to the wrong people. That's why you get so little actual info in emails from bank and medicals these days. 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.
- vidarh 6y ago
  Set it up to forward to their support e-mail addresses...

tyingq 6y ago

"they aren't getting account transaction emails (from their banks)" 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.

boogies 6y ago

> At this point I'm sorely tempted to delete my email and start over with another service provider. 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).

LatteLazy 6y ago

You can filter your gmail based on the TO field (so anything without the dot goes to spam) if you like. I've done the same thing myself intentionally: I give the dot-less version to sites/companies where I need to receive an email or two (account confirmation etc). Then I manually grab them from spam and then forget the whole thing knowing I'll never see the other crap they send me. Hope that helps, as someone with a common name I sympathize enormously.

davidbarker 6y ago
I've done this — I have a filter to move any email I receive without a dot into a "Not For Me" folder, which I periodically go through and usually send a canned response back about how they probably have the wrong person. 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".
justusthane 6y ago
You can also append “+whatever” to the username part of your gmail address and filter it that way. E.g. johndoe+mailinglist@gmail.com Unfortunately some services won’t accept that as a valid address.
- godelski 6y ago
  Others strip it too
- soulofmischief 6y ago
  And most email scrapers / aggregators these days also ignore the + and whatever comes after.
- jonpurdy 6y ago
  I wrote about this issue on my blog. Basically just using email aliases on a custom domain to enable per-provider filtering, and deletion of the alias if they ignore unsubscribe requests or get hacked. https://jonpurdy.com/2020/06/using-email-aliasing-to-detect-hacks-and-protect-your-privacy/ https://jonpurdy.com/2020/06/using-email-aliasing-to-detect-...

AdmiralAsshat 6y ago

I've encountered the same problem. One day I'm going to stop being polite and cancel the Hotel Reservations, Conference Invites, and other shit that this guy keeps signing up for using my email address. Maybe that will get him to finally pay attention.

RandomBacon 6y ago
I imagine then you've probably gotten receipts/confirmations with the person's phone number. Have you tried calling him and letting him know?
- AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
  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.
  - ovulator 6y ago
    Have you tried emailing them? You have their email address apparently ;)
- shiftpgdn 6y ago
  I have a common name, also a name used by a huge construction firm. I own firstnamelastname@gmail.com 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.

wycy 6y ago

Reset their account passwords.

eli 6y ago
I’d rather not commit a federal computer crime thanks
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  They provided false credentials. The account is yours. 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.
  - dotBen 6y ago
    They provided false credentials. The account is yours. IANAL but I don't think it works like that. Ownership is not the same as control.
    - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
      Ownership was never established in the first place.
      - dotBen 6y ago
        Sure it was. I create an account, accept the terms and condition and put in your email address, your phone number and your street address. It's still my account, I am the one that accepted the conditions (you would cry foul if you were bound by the conditions you didn't accept).

MaxBarraclough 6y ago

There's an xkcd for everything. Sure, that's probably my email address. https://xkcd.com/1279/ https://xkcd.com/1279/

liquidgecka 6y ago
Annoyingly that is different, everything after the + is _ignored_ so only one person can have <first>+<any lastname>@gmail.com. Other people I am guessing use first.lastname and that is where the confusion is. =)
- tialaramex 6y ago
  The XKCD cartoon isn't talking about a literal plus symbol. 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.
  - liquidgecka 6y ago
    I created and removed several single letter emails as part of a test once, and I made several short names (mine, spam@, etc). The biggest problem was that too short would take the backend down because it received more mail than could be indexes at the time so too short or too common would get deleted to protect the system. As far as I know Randal still has his though. :-) But yea your right about the plus I guess Ii didn't read it detailed enough.
- FabHK 6y ago
  The plus sign in the comic might just be meant to denote string concatenation (in other words, jsmith@gmail.com, not j+smith@gmail.com).

yakk0 6y ago

Same. The ones that surprise me are the credit card information or cell phone plans. I was able to contact the phone company and tell them to remove my address, but the credit card was an exercise in frustration. You can't get through without account or personal info. I just mark most of them as spam these days.

Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
Forward the email with the explanation you've given to abuse@<sender>. Most companies should have someone monitoring such an inbox. If that doesn't work I'd call the desk of the cto or shame them on Twitter.

bitbang 6y ago

Same exact issue. Especially with people from Africa for some reason. I get a lot of stuff from 3 people from Kenya, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. Most everything there is managed by phone, and they just use my email as a throw-away address. The guy in South Africa has a collections agency after him. The guy in Kenya likes to order food delivery quite a bit. I occasionally change his order to extra spicy. 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. 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.

searchableguy 6y ago
I don't receive any junk mails anymore after switching to my custom domain.
- justusthane 6y ago
  It’s weird, but that’s been my experience too. I switched off Gmail (where I got tons of spam, although most properly caught by the spam filter) several years ago, and have received fewer than 200 spam emails in total since switching. I know this because my new host won’t allow the personalized spam filter to be enabled until you’ve received 200 spam. 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.
  - timvdalen 6y ago
    I think you are lucky, I get around 5-10 spam mails on my custom domain daily. Granted, my address has been in a few data dumps.

agency 6y ago

Same exact situation here. I have {commonFirstName}.{commonLastName}@gmail.com and get so much legit email without the dot for other people with my name. There’s at least a few of them - a retired vet, a substitute teacher in Ireland, a middle school student in Montana. And just this week I got some from a bail bond place for a kid in Texas that included his picture. I don’t understand how these people aren’t constantly confused about not getting emails they expect

armoredkitten 6y ago

I get the same thing all the time. I think it's relatively common for people who signed up for Gmail early, and thus we able to get a bare named email (i.e., no numbers afterwards like john.doe420). 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.

iamthemonster 6y ago

I have a fairly common first name and last name and I thought I was a genius when I jumped onto an early gmail invitation in (I think) early 2005 to bag my "firstname.lastname@gmail.com". Now I realise I was a chump and should probably have just stuck with sexxiboi69@hotmail.com

Gibbon1 6y ago
> sexxiboi69@hotmail.com If you put that on your resume and they hire you, it's probably a good place to work.

fortran77 6y ago

My gmail address is simply my lastname @ gmail.com So I get a lot of emails meant for other people whose email is firstname.mylastname@gmail.com 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.

linuxftw 6y ago
Probably best you didn't. Unauthorized use of a computer system, even if you have the credentials, is considered hacking, at least in the US.

knorker 6y ago

I've sent a physical letter, when I got an electricity bill with a home address. A week later I got an apology email, and the incorrect emails stopped.

richard_g 6y ago

What's strange to me is why they thought that email address would work -- after all it's not their address. I've got years of emails from France for the same reason. You can set up a filter for the incorrect version of your email address (any email to namenodot@gmail.com) and get those out of your inbox.

saagarjha 6y ago
Lots of people don't understand how the Internet really works, or realize that there might be another person with the name of the person they're trying to contact.

liquidgecka 6y ago

Been there. I posted about this before but I own a 5 character common first and last name @gmail.com address. I get misdirected emails _constantly_. 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. =/

saagarjha 6y ago
That poor councilman…
jaredwiener 6y ago
Likewise -- I fall firmly into this XKCD https://xkcd.com/1279/ https://xkcd.com/1279/ 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.
- liquidgecka 6y ago
  Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beb8zCGMsbI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beb8zCGMsbI
- fishtacos 6y ago

bluehatbrit 6y ago

I have the same but it seems to be one specific person in Canada (I'm in the UK). I started getting emails about college prospectuses and applications, then I started getting them about library fines. I tried to email the library and inform them that they had the wrong email address and got nothing back. The latest has been emails from a car dealership trying to confirm some options for a new car. 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.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

Or, contact the legitimate recipient, and tell them to sue the bank.

Tagbert 6y ago
It’s very rare to have any other contact information for these people. It’s not like you can email them. :)

newtoday 6y ago

I've purchased a truck in Florida, been going to college in (I forget which state) for a few years now, opened an LLC AND filed for divorce with Legal zoom, was part of a venture partnership with multiple personal invite and discussion emails about investment meetings, and more! I've responded many times to these and the only replies are from the last one, and Legal zoom (who told me sorry, disregard it??)

wnevets 6y ago

I had someone open a bank account with my email and I called the bank thinking someone was stealing my ID or something. How do people not know their own email address?

Izkata 6y ago
I have someone using my email, who best guess doesn't understand Gmail and Twitter are two different things - they have the matching @name on Twitter.

coredog64 6y ago

Same, but my concern is that some day one of these people will convince Google support that they own my account and then I will really be hosed.

wyldfire 6y ago

> But what mystifies me is how these people keep going for years without ever realising they aren't getting account transaction emails 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."

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

pc86 6y ago

edgarvaldes 6y ago
I think this is the real answer. For those people there is no disruption in communication, because it never begins in the first place.

beowulfey 6y ago

Why not filter? If you know you always use the dot, filter without the dot. It works for me when I tried to set it up. Can even blacklist certain senders specifically so that if there are a few out there you made without the dot you will still get them.

abfan1127 6y ago

I get a guy's bank info from the east coast of the US. Recently, he started using Zelle. His Zelle activity was being emailed to me. One of his Zelle recipients used a phone number. I was able to call her, get his phone number and tell him about this issue. He still hasn't updated his email address. I don't get it...

makr17 6y ago

Yep, I live with this too... I thought it luck that I got <my_last_name>@gmail.com early on, turns out it was a curse. It's not a _common_ last name, but people with the last name seem to assume it is theirs, or maybe people miss the other letters in addresses they are given and just use the last name? 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......

deathanatos 6y ago

> But what mystifies me is how these people keep going for years without ever realising they aren't getting account transaction emails 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…

tialaramex 6y ago
I get physical mail for a previous owner, even though I've lived here for five years. Usually I notice, I write "Not at this address" and cross through the address in Sharpie then shove it into a mailbox, per regulations. 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.

dripton 6y ago

My gmail doppleganger signs me up for mostly animal charities and religious stuff. I keep unsubscribing and marking as spam. Sometimes I wonder if she does this on purpose, giving a "fake email" to people she doesn't want to deal with. If so, Diane, there's a real person with that email, and quit throwing all your spam at me.

mikelward 6y ago

And that's why email senders need to do double opt-in.

mrcu5 6y ago

I'm confused. Do people just assume they can think of an email address and Google somehow knows and assigns it to them automatically? Like they're signing up for something and put in "santosh83@gmail.com" and think "My name is Santosh and I was born in '83. Google obviously knows this and will send me this email!" ????????

pbhjpbhj 6y ago
I can't see that being the case (except exceedingly rarely) but perhaps if they had "santosh83@live.com" on an MS device and then got a device with Google mail they think their address is now "santosh83@gmail.com"? Or they're just nuts ...
emberfiend 6y ago
If you ever figure out why people do this or what their thinking is, let me know, but yeah this actually happens. I have a common name but a long and uncommon surname, and I have name.surname@gmail.com. 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.
- NiggaBytes 6y ago
  Is he in Auckland? If it's my GP I'll take it up with him for ya :P
rhino369 6y ago
Could be something like this: Had first.last@comcast.net, but migrated to gmail and had to use something else. Then they misremember and hand out first.last@gmail.com.

kadoban 6y ago

You can set up filters in gmail to either automatically go to a different folder ("label" they call it), or to just delete them. It's not hard at all once you get used to the interface, and there's a wide variety of rule options.

avel 6y ago

You get financial emails, I got about $1,200 through quickpay / zelle via my email address. 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.

tjpnz 6y ago

I share a name with a builder from Queensland and have been getting his email for years - loan applications, hardware receipts, updates about his rental properties, apprenticeship schemes - you name it. What's insane about it is how many people insisted they had the correct address when I used to follow up.