4 ms·
my gmail is my <lastname>@gmail.com It's not a super-common lastname, but there are probably several hundred people with it in the US. I get all sorts of emai
by fortran77 4y ago
my gmail is my <lastname>@gmail.com
It's not a super-common lastname, but there are probably several hundred people with it in the US.
I get all sorts of email for people whose address is some variant of it, like <firstname.lastname>@gmail.com. I've gotten plane tickets, paypal payments, cancer diagnoses, Bar Mitzvah and Wedding invitations, college transcripts, all sorts of personal information.
In many cases, I don't think it's the fault of the person with the email; I think they give their email as "firstname.lastname@gmail.com" and some clerk just uses "lastname@gmail.com"
- wrycoder 4y agoMy Gmail is firstname.lastname@gmail and I get mail to that account that’s not for me. Must be the other party has a middle initial they are leaving out.
- Brajeshwar 4y agoI would be careful with the "." in your username as someone else with `firstnamelastname@gmail.com` would likely get your email. I get the emails that are my ID with the "." in between.
- wrycoder 4y agoI thought that gmail ignored the period, and would not allow registering one of those accounts if the other one already existed.
- Brajeshwar 4y agoWell then, they didn't or it is relaxed now. I'm at the receiving end.
- bee_rider 4y agoSurely some of those are legitimate mistakes, but also I think things like the cancer diagnosis are probably designed to get you to respond. This proves that there's a human to spam/phish at that address. I've also gotten "we're here at the airport, are you coming to pick us up?"
- fortran77 4y agoThat's why I don't respond to any of them.
- m000 4y agoA misdirected email is usually easy to handle. I have no problem responding to people telling them that they hit the wrong mailbox. The real problem is people using your email to register with services that provide no viable way for you to completely deregister from them. Someone registered their brand new truck to my email address. I started getting a ton of automated email regarding the truck. The manufacturer didn't offer any options whatsoever to disentangle myself from that account. I even filled their support form and asked them to phone call the owner and sort it out. The only thing that did work was installing their app and honking the (parked) car horn from the other side of the world. A couple of days later, the account was magically deactivated and spam stopped.
- IG_Semmelweiss 4y agowhen a 30k piece of equipment becomes a 30k broken (or liability!!) piece of machinery and that is public info, things change fast!