WWYD- Getting someone elses emails? (LIGHTHEARTED!!!!)

DH gets the warranty details, booking confirmations and more recently a job offer and work schedule for a namesake up in Scotland. He isn't using Gmail.

For years I've been getting the bank statements for someone in Colombia. I've written to the bank in question several times and they did nothing as I could not answer security questions. In the end I just created a rule to automatically delete them

This hasnt happened to me, but, if anyone has been receiving payslips for a person who works for a charity in Ireland (and earns feck all), those would be mine. My HR had missed out the numbers in my email address and took forever to get it sorted.

I had this a few years ago - someone not a celebrity, but her name is well known, and happens to be the same as mine although quite unusual.
Used to happen both ways round, including me inadvertently getting confidential info.
i stopped using the gmail account in the end, she started using her middle name & presumably a new email.
I also used to get lots of linkedin approaches for her too, even though our profiles are nothing alike, she also got a few phone calls for me too at one stage.

Totally confused. Why can't you just forward them on to her?

I get emails for someone in South Africa (who had issues with her nursing studies), someone in the US and someone in Australia (who borrows a lot of money). Also someone who went to a coffee shop in my city (which creeped me out). Someone has also got me blocked from Uber (!), signed up for Morrisons (so now I can't), signed up for various things and then had emails resent multiple times because they (obviously) didn't get to verify their email.

I really wish those verification emails came with an option to say "NO, THIS IS NOT ME!"

My name twin potentially used my old email as her fake/junkmail or people just can't read. I was toothy_bitch@ fakemail and I think she was toothy-bitch or toothybitch. I knew where she lived from her Debenhams receipts and her health spa spam offerings.

The final straw was when I was miserably newly single and I got gushy emails from wedding and engagement vendors. I emailed them all back saying the relationship was over, don't message again, too painful. And got a new email.

I found mine on social media, she's 20 years younger than me and was very lovely when I let her know I was getting her emails.

I was inadvertently added to an email chain for an American family organising a joint trip somewhere. First year I deleted and ignored it, but a year later someone replied to the original email and it all kicked off again. I think I replied once telling them they had the wrong person, but the email chain kept going for years. I haven’t had an email for a while, so they’ve either cottoned on, or they don’t do it anymore.

I used to quite enjoy reading about all their plans, they sounded really lovely and I’m a nosey fucker.

Ahh, okay. That has sunk in now. I get it, although i also feel sorry for the person as i stopped responding to messages some time ago so they may have missed a lot.

Thanks!

My husband keeps giving my email to things without the numbers after my name. I’ve tried to email the other person without the numbers to say I think you have emails for me but she doesn’t respond. Maybe it’s an old account. I would quite like it to be honest so annoyed she’s not using it !

My favourite exchange was an argument with a fairly insane lady who couldn't grasp that I wasn't her friend.
"WHAT? YOU KNOW ME, WE HAD COFFEE ON WEDNESDAY! WHY ARE YOU SAYING WE'RE NOT FRIENDS?!"

This is so common, they can't grasp that the email address they thought belonged to their friend actually doesn't, even though that's literally what you are telling them.

I've replied to people saying "sorry, you've got wrong person, this isn't the email address of the person you are trying to contact" and they invariably reply "well that's the one you gave me last Monday!"

tbf I have in the past found my friend's phone left on my sofa then texted her to tell her... same vibes!

😂

I have the same situation with a number of different people. Some of them I like (one of their mums likes sending me family photos and always says 'lol oops!' when I tell her and offers to adopt me as I reply faster than her daughter. Some of them are idiots who put my email address into web forms and I get all sorts of acknowledgements meant for them. I either unsubscribe or if it looks important I reply and tell the sender I'm not the right person. One who had been rude to me when I tried to get her to stop using my email address (the email had other contact information in) had her restaurant booking cancelled the next time it happened.

My favourite exchange was an argument with a fairly insane lady who couldn't grasp that I wasn't her friend.
"WHAT? YOU KNOW ME, WE HAD COFFEE ON WEDNESDAY! WHY ARE YOU SAYING WE'RE NOT FRIENDS?!"

I have a teenage namesake is the American mid west who is in AmDram, scoccer squad and church. She seems lovely and I did get into a dialogue with her mum once when she got a birthday party invite 😂

When I saw the title, I actually thought this was that thread rearing its (genuinely stupid) head again, and wondered what on Earth the latest update could be. 😂

Thanks for that. I have just bought it on kindle for a 0.99. 😀

A security glitch that allowed us both to access the account makes sense. I imagine it was originally her account, as she had loads of stuff going on there, whereas I used it very infrequently (and not at all when it appeared in Portuguese!). I never sent any emails from it, but very occasionally received them. I imagine my Portuguese friend simply thought any of mine that she got were spam.

Another fun factor was that when gmail was in its Portuguese mood, it also changed all my sidebar adverts to Portuguese ones....!

Like I say, this was about a decade ago, which does chime with other comments on this thread about accounts set up a long time ago and possibly subsequently merged. The whole situation simply stopped without any action on my part, about five years ago.

I would be so tempted to reply with absolutely outrageous rubbish to them getting worse over time and see how long it takes for her to sort her email out or start a new one.

Oh I get these occasionally. It's a woman who lives in the US and frequently sends brownies to a friend interstate. I also get spam from various US supermarkets and the odd other email. Names virtually the same, I assume some missing punctuation or an initial at some point.

Interesting @Explodingdreams was it a whole google account they created for you, or just an email address, or was it an existing email address (eg "@"boots.com" that was then accessed through gmail? Seems a bit like you were both logging into one account, maybe she could access the password somehow, and changing the inboxes?! I'd have dropped that address like a hot potato...

I never left the UK during that period! And it wasn't simply a translation of my account - there were emails there from people I'd never heard of, with clear proper nouns/brands in subject lines that I'd never encountered.

In the end, everyone at my workplace just shrugged and mostly abandoned the account; I went back to using my non-work gmail address.

That sounds like you were working in or near Portugal or a Portuguese speaking country and the language defaulted on signing into the WiFi

I think those of us who are reasonably technically competent do understand the 'dot' issue and the likelihood of someone typing the wrong address.

However....about 10 years ago, one of my employers (I was a contractor working for numerous places) assigned me a gmail account, with my name on it. She did so while on a work trip in Europe.

Over the next few years, occasionally, on logging in, I would see someone else's entire gmail account instead of my own. That person had the same gmail address as me (it was given at the top) and I could see her old emails in her folders. The entire account was in Portuguese, so I didn't bother trying to work out what anything said.

At the times this happened, any work meetings set up for me via google would default to European time (I missed quite a few before it became apparent)!

And then it stopped. But it did seem to me that we were indeed sharing an email address.