I shared a story in another thread recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24307375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24307375) about my relatively be

I shared a story in another thread recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24307375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24307375) about my relatively benign Gmail being misused, but I had forgotten about the really weird encounter I had a couple of years ago. A woman texted me via iMessage that she was calling out sick to her job at a local public school. I replied that I hoped she felt better, but clearly had a wrong number. She insisted that I was Joanna, an Occupational Therapist at this school. (Emma gave me this number!). Clearly I was not, and did not know Emma, or any of the other things that were going on. Then she accused me of stealing Joanna's phone number. Turns out -- if you send an iMessage to someone in your Contacts, it does the first lookup by email, NOT by phone number. By assuming Joanna had my email address -- something lots of people seem to think is theirs -- I ended up also getting their iMessages.