[jen729w]

Someone with my name bought a new iPhone in Bismarck, ND last week. They gave AT&T my iCloud email address which is firstname.lastname. An honest mistake, I guess.

AT&T dutifully asked 'me' to confirm my email address. I did not.

Aaaand... now I still get all of his account email. So what's the point.

[soneil]

I've been struggling with this for years - but with a fun twist. My gmail address is first.last, and someone in the UK keeps using it - but they do not have remotely the same first name, and they don't spell their last name the same as I do (the single-L in my username here is a less common deviation, their surname is the more common variant).

Years. I've closed netflix accounts, I've sent them sms from their telco's webtext portal asking them to stop, and still there's a koneill out there who is very, very confused about why his email doesn't work. I know where he lives, I know what pizza he ordered, I know his name, his phone number, I just don't know his email address. And apparently, neither does he.

The number of services that fail at email validation (or keep sending you reminders, forever, that you haven't validated), blows my mind. For such a simple process, that seems to exist on every single service I (and koneill) sign up for, it has a surprisingly low rate of successful implementations.

[irrational]

There is a woman in another state that must have a gmail address very close to my wife’s. We know when this woman gets Botox, how much she pays for her kids dance lessons (a lot!), and so much more. You would think she would realize at some point, but it has been years and my wife still gets so much of her mail.

I used to get email for a guy in California when he would buy something from Harbor Freight, rent a movie from Redbox, or order a pizza. Those started tapering off about a year ago, so he must have figured it out.

The strangest one was I was receiving email for a colonel in the US Army! For a few years I kept getting these group emails to all these army officers about upcoming training exercises. I thought about replying to let them know they shouldn’t be sending them to me, but was worried about getting in trouble, so never did. They continued for years, but finally stopped. I always wondered if the guy had a .mil address and accidentally used gmail.com.

[rootusrootus]

I have a similar problem. I have a half dozen different people sending their emails to my gmail account. One of them is a woman who signed up my address for her health care provider, and they're quite liberal with what kind of detail they're willing to put in an email. I tracked her down on Facebook and mentioned it to her, and she seemed to get that it was a problem she might want to solve, but to this day I still get all those emails.

In retrospect I should have chosen [e-mail] or something.

[zx8080]

> I tracked her down on Facebook and mentioned it to her, and she seemed to get that it was a problem she might want to solve

Not a lawyer, but feels like you could be sued for a) reaching out and clearly mentioning you have some very private information.

How does it work for a paper mail - from what I understand it could be illegal to open any letter originated to some other person's name.

[rootusrootus]

> feels like you could be sued

As dysfunctional as the legal system seems to be at times, I'd be pretty surprised if she could find a lawyer willing to try that. At the very least, she'd half to pay a fair amount out of pocket just to initiate the suit, and this is someone who already hasn't shown much persistence in just getting the email address corrected with her provider.

A lawyer would presumably tell her that a case against me would certainly fail, and the healthcare provider has much deeper pockets. Go after them.

> How does it work for a paper mail - from what I understand it could be illegal to open any letter originated to some other person's name.

This is a federal law called "Obstruction of Correspondence" and it is fairly specific to USPS mail. It applies to letters & packages that are either in a postal facility (including the mailbox) or have transited through it. It does not apply to email.

[nucleardog]

Sued for what?

Unless he was trying to extort her he’s done nothing wrong.

Her healthcare provider, on the other hand, could be in some hot shit.

[ehPReth]

for paper mail here in Canada I just see it's not for me, mark a line though it and write "Return to Sender, no longer at address". Then it gets put in the outgoing mail system (a slot where I receive my mail, or could also take it directly to any standing postal box, or the post office). Then it goes back though the postal system (for free) to originating sender in most cases.

[rootusrootus]

For anyone else who runs across this, in the US you want to also put a line through the bar code at the bottom of the letter, so it cannot be scanned. Once a piece of mail gets that code, the post office stops reading anything else on the letter and just delivers the mail to where that code says it goes. So you can toss it back in an outgoing slot with 'return to sender' on it as many times as you like, and they'll just return it to you. Until you get lucky and the mail carrier sees it when gathering up the outgoing mail, and helpfully obscures that barcode for you.

[_jal]

Yep, very similar situation here. I get a lot of email for two different people, one in Texas and one in Leeds.

I also started getting a ton of spam from some cell phone retailer in Jakarta - someone used an email address of mine to sign up for a SIM, it seems, and unsubscribing from their crapflood is behind a password, assuming they'd even honor it. I blackholed their mail server at mine, but that doesn't scale.

And I get an endless stream of "a lot has happened since you last logged in" any time I un-blackhole Zuckerbook, and I've never used them.

At this point, every commercial entity I do business with gets a unique email address so I can turn them off. But that doesn't stop the confused/stupid/malicious from using them.

If I can find the time, I've been wanting to write a new milter-type tool to make it much easier to control which mail servers I'll talk. Yes, this is how SMTP dies. But at least it will be usable for me in the mean time.

[xp84]

> Yes, this is how SMTP dies.

Sounds like a feature to me!

[tverbeure]

I got a gmail invite pretty early and choose a single Spanish word that's the equivalent of John.

I'm the recipient of bank statements, cell phone statements, medical information, invitations to parties, and answers to HOA complaints. But more than anything, I'm the world's most prolific subscriber to dating websites, and my taste covers the whole spectrum and back.

I keep using the email address to use for low importance stuff. It's also a good way to see that clicking "Unsubscribe" actually works. Or better, the Spanish equivalent: "Darse de baja". I know the words very well.

[MiddleEndian]

One day, you should show up to one of those parties.

[KiwiJohnno]

I'm in exactly the same boat. Eventually I opened one if his phone bills which had his phone number (UK). I rang him and tried to explain the situation which quickly turned surreal.

He argued that I was lying about getting his phone number from his phone bills because he doesn't get his phone bill emailed out to him. I said yes, that is correct. Your phone bill is emailed to me. Eventually I got frustrated with him and told him I was trying do him a favour and he accused me of hacking his email account.

Then over the next few hours he called me back multiple times to tell me he had called the police, how much trouble I was in, and to tell me to stop calling him and harassing him or he would press charges. I pointed out he was the one that kept calling me, and somehow that registered and he never called back.

He did fix his phone account so I don't get those, but I get plenty of other email for him.

[grepfru_it]

I got a free peacock account this way. They just recently disabled their credit card, but I was able to watch the world cup for free and that's all that matters

[jen729w]

My mate Alex was getting email for a guy who should have been at work at Heathrow.

After years of trying to make them stop, he just started replying. “I’m not coming in tomorrow”, that sort of thing.

He never lied. He was not going to be at work at Heathrow tomorrow.

I think that finally made it stop.

[cscheid]

I don’t quite know why, but my combination of first and last name on gmail is such that I get email directed at other people with the same name as me, including financial documents. Wild stuff. I would reply with “um you probably should check before sending” but after a while I just started ignoring it.

[makr17]

My gmail address is [e-mail]. Not a particularly common last name, and I thought it lucky when I got that address early on. I've since come to view it as mostly a curse.

I get email invoice every time Orkin goes out to spray a house in North Carolina. No option to say "this isn't me", and I've given up calling to tell them after multiple cycles.

The elderly German couple that would email their train itinerary so that their cousin could pick them up at the station. I would politely reply that I am not their cousin, and consequently their cousin would not be at the station. And six months later we start again.

Someone in Canada with first initial + last name that results in my last name kept getting wired money, and I would get in email with instructions. Of course no "not me" option. I haven't seen one of those in a while, hopefully he figured it out.

And so many more stories of people with my last name or close to it happily sending me their email... But I've had the address for practically forever, and really don't want to let it go.

[EvanAnderson]

I love these stories.

I got service emails for the same year, model, and color Honda Civic that I own from a dealer in the UK. I am in the US. That alone was spooky.

The car was owned by somebody who matched my first initial, last name email address. (Edwin, I believe…)

I tried to unsubscribe. I tried to contact customer service. Nothing worked.

Each email would come with a little video walk around of the car. Eventually I started responding saying that their paint looked better than my car, etc.

I don’t get them anymore. I presume the owner sold the car.

[_whiteCaps_]

My gmail address is also [e-mail]

I've received Amazon gift cards, customs approval for a yacht arrival in Vanuatu, spreadsheets from Iraqi oilfields, children's book reports, pictures of dogs meant to be sent to veterinarians, etc etc.

[jwrallie]

Same situation, but on mine I got emails from some lady on the other side of the world that wanted to adopt a kid, then later she was scheduling some Botox applications, both cases I was half surprised that they didn't double check and half curious to see what comes next.

[grepfru_it]

Same story here, bro. It was really interesting when my cousins wife emailed me (not thinking it was new) about my cousins infidelity. That one made me rethink the safety of email addresses

[toast0]

Given there's a couple peeps who can't figure out their email address, I do my best to click on 'not me' or just ignore the confirmations intended for other people. But if I get mail for others that should have been confirmed, I mark it spam, because it is. Sometimes that includes an unsubscribe, which sometimes works.

[LorenDB]

Obligatory relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1279/