To contact the person using my email address?

[ChristmasStocckings]

For a while now some lady with the same name as me seems to have been accidentally using my email address. Its normally just her signing up for junk like marketing emails from clothing stores. However in the last month I have gotten some more personal ones like shopping and holiday booking invoices and today a medical invoice for an upcoming procedure.

We don't have a common name and with the amount of info I have about her I think I have found her on facebook. Would I be unreasonable to contact her and let her know? Or would that be too creepy or potentially backfire on me somehow?

My husband has a very unique email address. He was one of the first in line decades ago when the .com was released. So his is his name and .com. Very simple. No room for error.

Someone in America thinks it's his. He's used it for a decade!

My husband got flight confirmation, hotel bookings, banking details, everything comes through. He started off calling the sender to sort things out but it never worked. They'd just resend the information again.

A good while ago, after a decade of frustration my husband, probably wrongly, rebooked a transatlantic flight that kept coming in over and over.

It went pretty quiet after that, for several years. Then started up again.

I get this. I managed to contact the right person to let her know. She recently ordered an online voucher which came to me. I just rolled my eyes and deleted it. I’ve had enough tbh.

Of course with all the info over the years I gave her a good online stalking. It’s astonishing how easy it is to find out about people if important documents are coming to your inbox. Not going to do anything with the info obviously but it’s a Harlan Coben novel scenario.

Contact her is my advice.
I had someone who signed up to Ebay using [email protected]. It all came to me as gmail doesn't distinguish between Spring.fan2 and Springfan2. I had all her bid emails and requests for payment. Contacted Ebay- useless tried to tell me the email had obviously been reallocated as I didn't use it (just everyday for 5 years!) and contacted a couple of vendors to tell them that the bids were nothing to do with me, and asked them to let her know of the problem.I was getting 30-50 emails a day.SOmeone came back to me to say the other Springfan said it was her email!
Eventually, messaged her using her ebay user name, copied a message which included her home address and the items which gave the age of her child. I asked her to amend her account, and pointed out that I had been sent a lot of info about her. Had a message about a change of address from ebay withi 30 minutes and a moany message from her. She also signed up to FB and Dropbox with my address, which I cancelled.
OH and don't mention the poor lady whose DIL signed her up to E-on using my email. I ended up texting her and for ages was forwarding her on messages and bills.. E-on customer service was rubbish.

Someone in the US has a variant of my email address.

It's bloody tedious. I knew when she was getting married, applying to nursing grad school, had her first baby etc. as the junk mail I was signed up to changed.

I have contacted her but it keeps happening. So now I only reply if it is something personal/ time critical that comes through eg. the childminding rota or financial details.

I've stopped messaging her as she was so unresponsive and now message the sender.

I've never had it with emails but I did have several months of messages on my mobile from Leicester hospital giving me updates on a patient's condition, what they were doing next, and then when they were moving them to a different ward and that they should ring them back urgently at one point. Im in Scotland. I know not a soul in Leicester. My voicemail message says quite clearly what company they've called, yet they still left a message. The number they called from was, of course, a general hospital switchboard. I couldn't hear the patient's name clearly to know who they were. To top it off, when I called the hospital to alert them, the bint on the phone could not have been less interested.

I find it hard (impossible actually) to understand that apparently significant numbers of people cannot grasp that a sequence or letters and numbers cannot be approximated and still work.

Then again maybe these are the same people who call people a cunt for ever mentioning SPAG errors.

I know I am not great at getting strings of numbers (and spellings) right - but I double check, I don't just press/type what I vaguely think the number might be and hope for the best.

I had this. I forwarded the emails to the correct recipient.

I would tell her. For 3 years I have received emails from a high school in the US to someone with the same name as me about their child. I have finally managed to get through to the school and told me - it stopped about a month ago. I wanted to let them know because they were constantly emailing and about lack of attendance, poor marks etc and they must have thought the real mother didn't care!

I would! I’ve got the same name as a relatively well known singer based in LA and I cracked in the end after receiving a whole set of photos from her latest magazine shoot and a contract for her insurance. She was lovely and replied immediately thanking me so much.

I have this a lot, i've unsubscribed lots of times . They are mostly Americans but it is partly my own fault because I signed up early to gmail and have a very simple address . I have had enquiries about someone's visit to the emergency room and have had dates put on my diary . The most annoying one was someone in the far East that set up his fitbit using my email address one christmas, 12 hours before I could set my new one up . fortunatly my son sorted it for me .

A good while ago, after a decade of frustration my husband, probably wrongly, rebooked a transatlantic flight that kept coming in over and over

Good for him. I've changed the log in details for several gaming accounts - some with quite a lot of hours behind them. I've never had any thanks for pointing out (nicely) the error so I'm more than up for causing them trouble.

By the way, it’s been said before, but Gmail doesn’t recognise dots. So if you have “[email protected]”, nobody can register my.name or m.y.na.me and so on. In fact you can use any of those addresses and they will all come to your gmail! So it’s never that they’ve left out the dots by accident. They’ve just plain got the wrong email.

This happened with a member of my family. I had a lovely and polite email from the person involved in the mix-up. They said they were concerned for our privacy and also wanted to make sure that some important messages (family crisis) were received by the correct person. I replied to say thanks and apologised profusely. They were patient whilst we worked it out (it had to do with an alias and wasn't anyone's fault) and we all thanked them in the end. Everyone agreed it was something to do with Gmail and how aliases were used.

My old uni tutor had a name like Elaine E Evans. So her email address was either eeevans@whatever or elaineeevans@.

The person with the email address elaineevans@ was extremely unhappy with her.

I did this - a woman with my name was obviously getting married and when I got the email from her priest I replied and asked him to let her know! I was getting emails about venue enquiries and all sorts so she must have been pretty frustrated

My husband has an unusual name and often gets email meant for a man in Canada (why is it always Canada from reading PPs? )

Once he got a mail from a solicitor offering half a house in his divorce - he wrote back declining given that he wasn't getting divorced and didn't live in Canada, and got an ooops mail back from the solicitors.

It's amusing and largely he just ignores it unless it looks important and then he responds to say "That Canadian guy? He didn't get this".

I did this once with my parents' email address, sent to a man in USA - I did it twice - he let me know and I apologised, no harm, no foul. Thing is, it took me ages to work out how to remove the wrong email address from my Gmail account (when you go to type the email address, it pops up and you need to be vigilant when choosing the correct one) so if you do contact her @ChristmasStocckings you'll need to point this out, that she must ask whoever has the wrong email address, to remove it completely from their contacts/email account so that the same mistake can't continue to happen.

Oh I have this too. It's so annoying and it's a person in America. I have often emailed her (politely) and said stop using my email address but it doesn't work.

I now just block who ever is sending it, unless it's something very important when I reply that they should check who they want as I live in the UK.

This has just reminded me of that bloke in the USA who has the twitter account @johnlewis
Ignorant people keep tweeting him about stuff to do with the UK retailer - his responses are comedy gold.

I would contact her, to be honest, and offer to forward anything she's missed.

It's all very well if it's just crap, but things like booking invoices she will really need - and certainly medical appointments.

I once filled in an entire survey about local government in the USA - ended up in the comments by pointing out that I didn't even live in the USA.

I periodically get emails from the friends and family of someone with the same name including one long rambling gossipy one which was hilarious as it was slagging off a bunch of mutual friends. I did let the recipient know although tempted not to as it was quite enthralling

I've also suspected my email was being used for spammy sign ups by somebody else - if it happened regularly I'd be tempted to contact the companies in question.

Someone signed up for an Instagram account and used my email address - I assume by mistake. I only found out when I tried to sign up using my email address only to be told the account already existed!

I did a password reset, deleted all the stuff off there (there was hardly anything, didn't seem to have been used recently) and took control. Now it's my account

@DesignerDesigner

Apparently her email was First dot last name @ gmail dot com. And Google omit the dot between the first and last name.

No Google don't because I have a DOT there!

It should be almost impossible to have the same email account right down to the dot or underscore or whatever.

OP- change your email account or ask her to.

No way would I change my email account! It’s my firstnamelastname and I’ve had it since Gmail came out! I have a fairly uncommon name and manage to grab it for most things (email accounts, site urls like Facebook and LinkedIn).

Her Facebook profile shows that she got married a few years ago and changed her last name (which now marches mine). She should just make sure she uses her own email address and not mine!

There's a young woman in America who must be very supple with a very clean mouth and bumhole, as I'm always getting her dance class, dentist and colonic irrigation appointment reminders.

I've tried to stop them, but no luck, it's just nice to know she's keeping well!