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My email address is not your email address
Veevee
WisconsinRegistered User regular
WisconsinRegistered User regular
I have had a small, on-going issue for a couple years now where someone would enter my email address instead of their email address. My gmail account is a very intentional arrangement of 6 characters using 2 letters of the alphabet, so it's not impossible for someone to enter it as a "fake" address, but I will occasionally get emails of various levels of importance that are intended for someone else. A non-exhaustive, off the top of my head list of emails I have been mistakenly sent are:
Edit: Oops, didn't mean to hit post. Give me a second to finish this...
Sometimes I will email the place back and sometimes I'll just ignore it, but the reason I'm posting this is because I just spent 15 minutes with customer service for someone else's mortgage because they switched their email on the mortgage to my gmail address. I asked them to ask her to stop doing this as it wasn't the first time this person has accidentally used my email, so hopefully they do that, but is there anything more I can do to stop this from happening in the future or am I doomed to this happening because of the proliferation of *random letter*mail email addresses?
Thinking about it now, I probably wouldn't have actually posted this had I not hit the post button on accident, but it's done and I don't want to just delete everything.
- Bills and event information from child care facilities in New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. All different for people/families as far as I can tell
- Tax bills for a company out of Myanmar
- Shipping information intended for a company in India
- Information about tracked cars from a small company in Tanzania
- Leasing information for someone in Florida
- Random family photos from stranger's grandparents
Edit: Oops, didn't mean to hit post. Give me a second to finish this...
Sometimes I will email the place back and sometimes I'll just ignore it, but the reason I'm posting this is because I just spent 15 minutes with customer service for someone else's mortgage because they switched their email on the mortgage to my gmail address. I asked them to ask her to stop doing this as it wasn't the first time this person has accidentally used my email, so hopefully they do that, but is there anything more I can do to stop this from happening in the future or am I doomed to this happening because of the proliferation of *random letter*mail email addresses?
Thinking about it now, I probably wouldn't have actually posted this had I not hit the post button on accident, but it's done and I don't want to just delete everything.
Veevee on
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I don't actually have any contact information for this person other than their rather common first/lastname combo. It's why I asked the mortgage company to pass along my message.
So, change your email address. It's a bit of a pain to do, but it's the only way I see to fix the problem.
Or just enjoy the window into other peoples' souls that you have and mark all of those emails as spam after you read them.
We would get about 100 or so calls every Christmas Day asking if we were open.
Guess what we did?
"Yup, come right on down!" (no we did not actually do this)
I think this went on for a decade before my dad got so frustrated he purposefully purchased a new number that would be placed between ours and the grocery stores in the white pages and set that number up to autoforward to the grocery store number. Think about doing that in the early 90s and how expensive and much of a hassle that would be.
Sometimes I get annoyed enough that I send a nastygram to a large company that doesn't require e-mail verification and should know better. Usually I just make excessive use of Gmail filtering and "report spam."
Once for about six months, someone had given my phone number to Walgreens to alert them about prescription refills! Finally, the actual pharmacist called and I was able to tell them about the problem....
I just set up a filter to delete when it picks up their name in the message.
Err. I don't actually have a solution. I just wanted to share. >.>
You can use filters to help, but that will be imperfect.
I would probably set up a new account, then have all the emails from the old account forward to the new one. You can send "from" either account as needed, but slowly move everything to the new account.
I am pretty close to the same as this, except the person is fairly close to me, about 15 miles out of town. What makes it odd is that I have an unusual last name, and we have different first names but use the same shortened version. Fortunately he seems to have just used it at the hardware store, so I just have to put up with emailed receipts every so often.
Same thing here. Drake Chambers is my fictional pseudonym that I made up in high school. For the last ten years or so I've gotten regular emails for a real Drake Chambers, including personal emails from college friends, state tax agency communications, and group emails to him and his classmates in professional trade school.
Depending, sometimes I reply and correct them. Sometimes I feel a little bad for claiming this guy's name before he arrived at the Internet, as I assumed he was forced to choose some variation of his name and people are mistakenly missing the variation and sending it to me instead.
There's been a couple where I've wondered how the person hasn't noticed there is something wrong. A couple cruises here and there, travel info, that kind of thing. What's really annoying me though is the last few months. The New York Transit Authority just set up a new system for EZ Pass auto-enrollment and such, and required emails. Well, my email got used accidentally, so now I get to see just how much someone is spending on their commute. Took me a bit to figure out what is going on too, because I have an Illinois EZ Pass account too. I have tried twice to contact the Transit Authority about the issue, but they require you to call in about any kind of issues if you can't sign in, and the wait time was over 45 minutes each time.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
This is why I recommend people to register their own domain.
That one I replied to...
:bro:
A movie director in the US has the same name as me, with one letter difference in spelling in their email address, and I was getting a bunch of their production emails. I initially forwarded them on, but it got so frequent that I started replying and telling people to fix their email lists. The director asked to buy my email, but I've had this account since 2001 or 2002 so no. Anyway, after probably four or five years, they stopped.
But now I get that firstname.lastname crap. I tried to tell them what was happening but got ignored, so I just mark them as spam now. Banking emails, business stuff, whatever.
But it will literally never end and that's just part of using a monolithic service like gmail.
I quite like it
And after about the twentieth time I accidentally typed in firstnamelastname@gmail.com, I sent an email to that person to say "hey, I'm really sorry about all those emails you've been getting that make no sense, they're from me and here's why". I think I've retrained my fingers by this point.
(they were very nice about it, too)
they finally got in touch with me after I mistakenly got a Western Union Transfer for like $1000 bucks in my mailbox by accident. Was fun getting yelled at by the people who's spam I've been getting for years.
Well, yes, but clearly this is the kind of person that likes to blame others, but Nexus is an uninvolved third party. This is like calling the wrong number and yelling at the person who answered the phone.
That happens to me all the time. Our 800 number at work is 1 digit off the 800 number for a major call center for a range of store credit cards, so naturally we get wrong number calls constantly. I can't count how often I've been yelled at because I can't help them with their Victoria's Secret bill after clearly answering the phone with an obviously unrelated business name ... or, my favorite, asked "Well why are YOU answering THEIR phone then?"
People are dumb.
So, you saw the thing about the guys funeral upthread.
Today I learned that the venue for Fancy Dinner has been emailing them about our party because wrong email....
That's what I once thought. In 45 years, I've never met or heard of anyone outside my immediate family with my last name. I was shocked to discover that there was another me... My first reaction was that it had to be identity theft.
... then I remembered no one would want to steal my identity.
Downside: you have no Google shield.
I'm pretty much ungoogle-able because there are a couple B list folks in various public industries with my first/last name combo.
Yeah if someone managed to hack their way into my bank account they could like.. pay off my credit card and car loan and not a lot else.
I realize that's not the only thing to worry about, but I'm not exactly sitting on a large nest egg.
also that's not really email-related I guess.
My advice for the annoying recurrent ones is to use the link to reset their passwords and change as many info fields as possible to embarrassing/juvenile things, so that they encounter it when they go to reset it.
This is true, BUT!
Gmail also let's you filter by email address, which does take periods into account so you can use this to your advantage. When you sign up for crappy junk you don't want to get emailed about, you can add a random period in your name, and then filter out all emails to w.hatevername@gmail.com