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Comment by skissane | Hacker News Reader

My gmail is my first initial followed by my last name. There are other people on this planet with same first initial and last name, some of whom seem to think that must be their email too, because I keep on getting emails where they used it to sign up for things.

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I had a lady send me a zip file that contained a VPN client, certificate and a word document with usernames and passwords to the VPN and a number of industrial control systems at the factory she was a manager of.

She sent it religiously, every 90 days.

Every few months I get scans of X-rays from random clients' teeth from some dentist in South America. I've tried so many times to respond and/or unsubscribe but never hear anything back.

Do you have any clue who she thought you were?

Oh yes, she was emailing a copy of her stuff to “herself”.

Seriously?

How the hell could she think that your email address was hers? I mean, wouldn't she notice that she never got the messages?

Totally serious. There are about a dozen people who regularly do this. One guy has missed 4-5 job interviews.

So is it typos? Like one letter off?

I can imagine someone mistyping an address, and then reusing the "to" link.

I faced the same problem (though my name is not at all very common). Banks, mobile companies never did anything even after I repeatedly told them on phone and Twitter (and have kept a record of it).

One day after I had received a person's bank, mobile statement and many other bills for few months I decided to call him (his number was easily visible in many emails) and inform him of his mistake. He turned out to be lawyer and he said he will "decide" what to do about it. And the next thing I know is he sent a carefully drafted email (as a legal notice) that I should hand over my email address to him without further delay and all that.

I didn't do that. I talked to a lawyer friend and he just told me to reply with a "G F Y" card. I didn't do that either. But that pushed me to finally move my emails to my personal domain as it was/is a Gmail account and if someone complained Google would have just terminated my account and I don't know anyone who works at Google.

That lawyer sounds like a douchebag. I super agree with your point too: I'm also slowly moving all my emails to my personal domain and it feels liberating.

I get several on a weekly basis. It's amazing how many services do not verify emails and just trust their users to own the email they claim to own.

It’s a common “growth hack” to postpone email verification.

Even more baffling are the ones who use it to fill out job applications.

I get bank statements, job offers, party invitations, and lately a bunch of lets say very questionable email verifications from euro 'dating' sites- I've identified the guy in the UK but its too much (and getting embarrassing now) to keep forwarding his stuff to him.

Downside of getting in early on popular email services.

I went through several rounds of conversation with somebody's wedding planner over email.

> but its too much (and getting embarrassing now) to keep forwarding his stuff to him

What amazes me is when I get misaddressed email, and I reply to say its misaddressed (and I'm not talking about automated services, I'm talking about obviously manually sent stuff), and my reply just gets ignored and the misaddressed email just keeps on coming.

Somebody keeps phoning me and leaving messages. They don't answer their own phone (or messages clearly). I even have a sarky voicemail now, you'd think they'd notice. Nope!

Lady, whoever you think is going to be at that funeral isn't getting that message.

I've no idea if they'll get disconnected now as I've blocked their number. Hope so maybe they'll notice then.

That's the most surreal, when you try to fix it and the behavior never changes.

My gmail is two initials and last name, so theoretically less susceptible to such errors. Yet I get misaddressed mail all the time—and a surprising amount of it is job applications!

Trust me, I used my full first name, it's not enough to stop these people. One is a UK doctor, one is a US teacher, and I think there are one or two more. Been sent a few baby pictures from their relatives too.

This happened to me and I keep getting the guy's notifications on instagram and all. So annoying!

Relevant xkcd: https://www.xkcd.com/1279/

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