[Spooky23]

I have a common first initial last name gmail address and similar lastname.com domain addresses.

The mail I get is astounding. I've received:

- A word document containing most of somebody's online passwords, including work passwords and the vpn client for the persons work.

- multi-angle Video of an accident investigation involving a bus flipping over a highway medium

- a series of swimsuit modeling and sexy emails from some lady to her boyfriend, followed by angry emails about his lack of attention

- football and soccer pools

- emails from some guy who test drives various luxury cars every 3-4 months

- legal papers from various people

- fan mail to a niche celebrity

[echelon]

I have `echelon at gmail`, and I've received similar. The volume of mis-delivered email outweighs my own legitimate email at this point.

- Multiple PayPal transactions sent to me (up to $400), several of which I've reversed on my own.

- Résumés (Not blindly sent, mind you! They think they know who they're talking to, but they didn't do their homework on the email address.)

- Dozens upon dozens of architectural renderings from several parties.

- Shipping information.

- Order confirmations.

- Screenplays, some of them with actors attached to them in an official-sounding way. ("My client wants XYZ, ...")

- Random legal documents that are marked as "privileged". On a few occasions I've had people realize their mistake and ask me to dispose of the emails.

- Trip itineraries and flight information for several people traveling internationally. (I hope this doesn't put me on some kind of list.)

- Random personal photos.

- Stuff about fire department codes (a few times).

- People signing up for just about any service you can think of. This alone can be bad in several ways:

1) Services that don't do email verification essentially grant me unfettered access to the account that was created under my email address. (Dropbox, Snapchat, etc.) Zero friction, right?

2) Sony won't let me register with my email for PSN since someone in another country "claimed" it. That account is in Portuguese or something, and I've been unable to get US support to free my email address since I need to talk with supporters in that country. I don't speak the language, and I haven't gotten any help.

It's pretty crazy what people are unwittingly sending me or blindly trusting me with. If I were a malicious person, I could do lots of evil. I try to respond to many of these with "I'm not the intended recipient", but often I just don't have the time and I don't want to set up an auto-responder.

[PakG1]

I have a [e-mail] email address. At first, I was super annoyed that I kept getting emails meant for [e-mail] and was upset that Google kept sending those emails to me. But as I later understood that Gmail is simply trying to avoid creation of multiple email accounts that are too similar, I realized something else. People are just ignorant and stupid. It's not Google's fault if those people don't know the correct email address of the person that they're trying to contact.

So people will continue to email the wrong person, and I will continue to receive those emails. Although I don't know why nobody ever emails [e-mail] as the wrong email. It's always [e-mail]. But whatever.

Because of people's ignorance and stupidity, I am changing my email address to a custom domain hosted by fastmail.com. It's just worth it in the end. Besides that, I'm currently living in China, and Fastmail is accessible here without VPN, while Gmail isn't. So two birds with one stone.

But it was not wanting to deal with ignorant and stupid people that was the driver for this move. The number of such wrongly directed emails seem to be increasing. Grr.

[tga]

FYI, Gmail ignores dots before @.

[e-mail], [e-mail], and [e-mail] are all the same address.

[PakG1]

Yes, I know. :)

[richardw]

Same here (name.surname). Next Gmail account will be a guid because I get far too much junk. At one point I set up a Google group for my namesakes. If I recognise the context I forward it.

Wish I could turn off Gmail equating namesurname with name.surname. That's far more than 50% of it.

The lingerie pic was nice. Poor lady was very pleased I'd deleted it!

[ghkbrew]

If you exclusively use name.surname, you could set up a filter to catch anything sent to namesurname and automatically have it skip the inbox/put in a folder/deleted/whatever

[richardw]

Thanks! Just checked my filters and I have exactly that rule which I've turned on and off a couple times. I feel bad because I've had really important emails that people might have missed, e.g. an alert for a funeral of an old friend, or a hotel booking. Today was a flight in a Spitfire that someone had booked.

But upvoted for being helpful.

[justinlardinois]

> - a series of swimsuit modeling and sexy emails from some lady to her boyfriend, followed by angry emails about his lack of attention

Do you not correct people after the first wrong email they send you?