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

[WiddlinDiddlin]

I've been recieving someone elses emails for the better part of twenty years now.

Her email address is nameinitialsurname, and mine is just namesurname. The issue is our first names and her middle initial are such that its easy, so so easy to miss that initial.

Imagine JulieJJohnson or SophieESmith...

Most stuff I can ignore happily, updates on her car warranty, invites to church pot lucks. Some of it I nosey at, the frequent and detailed emails from her brother as he was on his missionary years (they are Mormons) overseas were actually interesting (if you're a nosey fucker as I am).

I have tried to contact her (I have found her on FB, she has ignored my message, I friend requested her so she'd be more likely to see my message, that was ignored too).

I have actually emailed back and forth with her DF.. he seems a nice guy.

I have replied to many emails - for example when I was sent the passwords and account details for the church bank account, and when I was sent sensitive information about her daughters school classes - to correct the error.

But the error continues to occur, either because she doesn't make it clear to people to include the initial in her email address or she allows people to write it out themselves and they mess up.

Yesterday I had to cancel a zoom meeting for an outpatient hospital appointment, there was no way to contact the sender (that I could find) to let them know I wasn't the right person, and that she would be unable to join the zoom. I could have fwd'd it to her actually... damn, didn't think of that.

Tonight I've just replied to a multi-person email chain (14 members of her family) discussing selling some personal items, to point out they or at least one of them, as her email address wrong ... and can they correct it!

I know too much about this other ladies life, and I feel a growing sense of responsibility about this... that I really do not want! It's been twenty fecking years!!!

What would you do?

DP suggested I should just join in and consider them family and see how long before someone bloody notices!

I have an email/name twin, I don’t get much for him now but I either reply with the correct email address or forward it directly depending what it is. We’ve struck up a friendship of sorts, once every year or so, nice chap.

Trouble is my email defaults/remembers American David so I always have to double check now!

This is a big part of the problem: where something is autosaved/autofills, so nobody ever checks it again and just assumes that it must be right. Autosave and autofill make it very easy for you to reliably make the same mistake 1,000 times!

I'm amused at people getting angry at and accusing others who have been sent emails for them in error, when they contact them to make them aware. Would they prefer you just not to tell them that all their confidential info is coming to you? Do they think that criminals deliberately hack into their email and then kindly let them know about it, rather than keeping it under wraps and using it to commit crime?!

I do think it seems a bit foolish when people change their names for an email address, because the email address for their actual one is already taken, as opposed to adding a middle initial, town name, special extra word or whatever. I don't mean 'Rebecca' becoming 'Becky' or 'Jonathan' becoming 'Jon'; but if your name is Tracy Clark, choosing TraceyClarke @ email.com does seem to be setting yourself up for a fall when everybody knows your actual name spelling. I know a 'Carl Smith' who uses 'KarlS' in his email. I never understand that.

I have a long, obscure, difficult-to-spell Shakespearean-type word as part of my email address, which I think probably helps to avoid this, as (apart from nobody else using it or a similar one) nobody assumes and people type it out very carefully and slowly indeed before reading it back to me to check, rather than just hearing it and assuming that they will automatically know how to spell it - like you would when you have to enter a randomised activation key code for software or whatever.

No it hasn't - hers has an additional initial, mine does not.

Hers: [email protected]

Mine: [email protected]

Two different email addresses. Not an issue until she or one of the people she's given her email address to, misses out that middle J. (Obvs. Not her or my email address).

Oh my gosh. It's an exact repeat of the last headbanger on this topic. The two emails you typed are the SAME EMAIL in gmail. Yours. You're not getting anyone else's email. They are giving out the wrong address!

Yes

One of my namesakes has recently bought a Mazda in Jackson, Ohio and I'm getting her warranty spam

Texan Me is an elderly MAGA who signs up to charities, is regularly phished and whose husband is a Knight of St Columba

Floridian Me is a Democrat and works at NASA

Rhodes Island Me lives in a gated community and has ordered china pieces from a company that specialises in selling single pieces to replace parts of tea sets and dinner sets

Missouri Me often buys from Bed Bath & Beyond

There are New Zealand, German and a variety of Irish Mes as well.

It gets quite tiresome

Why are people so insistent it hasn't happened when it has to so many people? Bit rude

Nobody’s saying it doesn’t happen that people get someone else email. It happens to me actually!

What we’re disputing is that this has anything to do with dots in emails, because it doesn’t, it can’t, and it’s easily disproved.

Not least by the simple question - how do you know what the other person’s email
address is? It can’t be what’s in the address line of the email because that’s your address, by logic of the fact you received it!

I absolutely do understand what Gmail should do ( IE the dot makes no difference), but I have also observed different behaviours ie I used to reply to the person and cc the no dot email ( copy & paste) sometime it came back to me ( as designed Gmail behaviour) , sometime it didn't ( unexpected behaviour). I stopped doing that a few years ago - so not sure I could trigger it again.

I have also done reverse emails searches on 'both' email structures and it has returned 2 profiles - one being the same 'other me'

I not making any argument about Gmail functionality as designed, I simply talking about odd behaviours

@WiddlinDiddlin I think @Thamantha was saying it had clearly happened to her, not in your case!

I quite like hearing about North Carolina me. I don't get the emails so much any more now.

It isn't a problem with gmail dots.
It is a problem of putting the wrong email address and missing a letter out.

Indeed,

The problem in this thread is not between my.name@gmail and myname@gmail. it is that someone is incapable of using their real email address of my.y.name or myyname (they're both the same thing).

gmail, hotmail, secure government email, royalmail, a telegram, whatever can't send something to the right place if you tell it to go to the wrong place.

This happens to me too. Whilst slightly irritating for us both she could just delete emails she realises are for me or advise me that 70 year old auntie Margaret has my email wrong in the first instance. She rants makes threats to report me for GDPR offences or to my employer every time someone sends her an email meant for me. It happens sometimes.... forward the email and let them know that person has their email address wrong then block the senders email address.

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.

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 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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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. 😂

I should have known better, really... I just wanted to know what others would do, rather than go round the merry go round again with the dots and the no dots and so on!

Silly me!

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 😂

😂

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?!"

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!