[fortran77]

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 "[e-mail]" and some clerk just uses "[e-mail]"

[m000]

A 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]

when a 30k piece of equipment becomes a 30k broken (or liability!!) piece of machinery and that is public info, things change fast!

[wrycoder]

My 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]

I would be careful with the "." in your username as someone else with `[e-mail]` would likely get your email. I get the emails that are my ID with the "." in between.

[wrycoder]

I thought that gmail ignored the period, and would not allow registering one of those accounts if the other one already existed.

[Brajeshwar]

Well then, they didn't or it is relaxed now. I'm at the receiving end.

[em-bee]

more likely some people just don't know how to write their own email address. or typos.

[muro]

Pretty sure the dot is still ignored

[bee_rider]

Surely 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]

That's why I don't respond to any of them.