I have firstname.lastname@gmail.com. My name is not very common but not totally uncommon and I've had very similar experiences to the article and others here.

I have firstname.lastname@gmail.com. My name is not very common but not totally uncommon and I've had very similar experiences to the article and others here. The most surprising thing I had was someone who signed up to an Amazon account using the address (my own amazon account has always used a different email address). Whoever did that literally gave a complete stranger access to their credit card. (I contacted Amazon and got them to remove my email from the account).