Hacker News Reader

This happens to me all the time, as have my lastname @gmail.com, and my name is not as unique as I thought. I typically contact the real person via some other information leaked in the email.

I once had a lady accuse me of cyber-stalking her, since I texted her when I started getting her Verizon internet information (bills, shipping info for equipment, etc). I finally managed to explain to her that she'd given them the wrong email.

View on HN

My wife worked selling cell phones for a while. Apparently there are a huge number of older people who don’t understand that just because they put the email on the form that doesn’t mean they own the email address.

It's not just old people, many people who aren't techies think that entering an email address into a Telco form means they're ASKING for that email address. I get multiple emails per day for all sorts of services from all over the world because I was an early Gmail user with a short account name. Most are people signing up to new phone/internet/etc services and they have my name as their first or last name.

Same thing happens to me. When I get "verify your email" messages, I delete them. If I still get emails after that, I mark them as spam.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com