To wonder why I'm getting everyone else's email?

[Stringofpearlies]

I've got an email address that's first name last name at gmail dot com. This means I get all kinds of email meant for other people with my name when people mistype the address, anything from real estate paperwork to ultrasound results. But I also get signups where the person themself had to have used my email address to sign up for store emails. Someone even used it to set up an Asda Rewards account. My question is, does anyone out there do this as a throwaway to avoid getting promo emails, or are people genuinely just forgetting what their email address is? I've not found any evidence of being scammed, it's just irritating.

If your email is something like janedoe @ gmail.com then yeah people probably do use it to sign up to things that they want to forget about.

Otherwise it's just people mistyping their email address.

I get this quite often but going by what the emails are about i assume the person is forgetting to put the extra letter/number in when they use it. Its not a throw away address they're using

I'm quite nosy and would find some of this stuff quite funny. But ultrasound results? Did you contact the sender for that one to say wrong person? My DH was in an email chain for a strangers stag do in Scotland. The person had a virtually identical email address and same surname. It was quite interesting, we kept on wanting to reply giving mad suggestions of what the stags were going to get up to!

I've read threads like this before, and the consensus is Gmail cannot distinguish between jane.doe and janedoe.

Gmail don't recognise the dots, so if you are (eg) [email protected] then you are also [email protected] and [email protected] etc. Nobody else can register the versions with dots because amybaker in any combo of letters and dots belongs to you!

But other email domains do recognise the dots. So if you had [email protected] someone else could still register [email protected].

It's probably people forgetting which email domain they use and typing gmail when they mean ymail or hotmail, or forgetting that they're actually amyabaker or amyjanebaker etc.

This is what I was wondering. I guess I thought it was crazy that people would forget their own email address, but then again, mine is super easy to remember because there's no added letters or symbols - just my name. I know in at least one case the woman had an extra middle initial.

The amount of people who seemingly don’t know their own email address is shocking.I also have first name.last name@gmail and I’ve had flight tickets, bills for care homes in Australia, a fabulous railway trip across Australia, Dog Kennelling in Texas, a wedding planner in the UK who wouldn’t accept her bride had given her the wrong email address, and The Great North Run can fuck right off with the amount of times I’ve told them I haven’t signed up and it’s my idiot name twin.

My husband has the same problem. He has a whole ‘second’ family in South America who he’s been added to a round robin email. He told them years ago, they had the wrong person but they still send emails regularly. I think he was invited to the Granny’s funeral a few months ago!

Yeah it's the dot thing. DH has had court summonses and other similarly serious stuff for [email protected] and/or [email protected] when he's [email protected].

I've had summonses to parent teacher meetings, flight confirmation emails and job interview emails. I gave up responding - if they can't get the email right on important stuff like that it's a lesson waiting to be learnt

I got a series of emails about some man signing up for a professional exam, his hotel booking etc. I hope he did turn up to it and pass, but if it was anything to do with attention to detail, he really did fail at the first hurdle.

I take email addresses at work over the phone, or if people do it themselves they input their own email address online, and there's a fair amount that don't know their own email address and ring up when they don't get the email they were expecting, I check it, resend and still no, so I ask them to email our address and then copy and paste, invariably they've left out a dot, a number or got it in the wrong place somewhere along the line and that's been the issue.
And yes occasionally I take it down wrong or mishear letter or number.

The problem is that if it's an actual email address, just not theirs, then I have no way of knowing it's wrong because it doesn't 'bounce back'.

It's not the dot thing. We have this every time. The other J Smith doesn't have [email protected], because that's the same email address as [email protected]. They have purely and simply got their email address wrong.

There are other threads on this. It always ends with 20 people telling me I'm wrong about this, but I'm not. Dots in gmail ARE NOT the issue. People not getting email addresses right is.

It could be both. Both are known to happen.

no @AtomicBlondeRose has it 100% right for Gmail. Other email providers do recognise dots but Gmail specifically doesn't.

I’m also a member of an HOA in Florida for the ‘elders’ - I get all their bills as well as invites to loads of social events - sounds fun but a bit of a way 😆

I get this. Not that often. Normally I just ignore, but in two instances I had to reply - one was from a cats protection type facility that were trying to email someone that was adopting a gorgeous boy. That was UK. I hope he got his forever home.
One I kept getting from the USA with really important documents like flight tickets etc. So I replied to the companies sending the emails who hopefully contacted them intended recipients.

Yeah, I know it's not nice if they've made an honest mistake but if I can log into an online portal they've signed up for, I go in and delete the account, hoping they get the message!

Someone gave out our wedding email address for their wedding...lots of rsvps came our way but we had NO idea where to send them on to

Thanks everyone for your messages, some of which are so funny 😂I just remembered how I was getting bank notifications for someone in another country, and when I contacted the bank they were adamant that they couldn't stop the notifications until the person logged into their account... using the wrong email address, for which all confirmation emails came to me. So as far as the person knew, they just never got the automated notifications when they made a transaction. I think in summary, it is possible that people just don't know their email address (even though that seems crazy to me); or someone else is inputting it incorrectly. I've heard the dots thing before and I think it boils down to, yes Gmail doesn't recognise dots, but as a result it's impossible for two people to have separate addresses where dots are the only thing separating the words. So that's another case of mistyping or misremembering the address. Phew.

When organising my hen do, we got a response from a lady in South Carolina saying thay while it sounded fun she couldn't justify the expense of flying to England to party with people she doesn't know. It gave us a good laugh. It resulted from the fact that my sister is one of thoes people who has had about 8 email addresses over the years and we get totally confused which is correct so I had mistakenly given my maid of honour the wrong address

Oh yes, I definitely reply back in those cases. In fact those are the simplest to work out because it's clearly a clinic/agent/representative who's got the address wrong. I spent a long time emailing with a temp agency a while back because the person sending the emails somehow didn't have the authority to remove my address from their database, had to fill in a bunch of forms. I have found incidentally that if you can get hold of the Privacy Officer for any organisation they act pretty quickly to shut things down!

I also was the person in this situation through no fault of my own. During lockdown, a year after I left a company I got a text message from someone saying they had tried to sign up to a parking app for work and when they did I brought up my account, including address, phone number and bank details. I was shocked. She had the same name as me, a very unusual name. Work had simply given her the same email address as the one I had when I worked there. So she was able to access anything I had signed up to. I wish I had raised it with the security officer at the time but I had so much else on. Still fills me with rage.

Yeah my namesakes are some Lawyer in the USA and a retired Aussie doctor, both of whom are too dim to realise I got to our gmail address first so it's not theirs. The doctor sent some confidential patient data on appointments he had (before he retired). The Lawyer in the USA was being sent some investment documents by a woman in Canada who told me off because she thought my attempt to alert her to the use of the wrong email was a "jerk response".

I have also given up trying to be helpful.

There was someone in the UK too - payroll sent me their payslip and then tried to remonstrate with me when I tried to warn them.

They can all fuck off now - I am embarrassed to share a name with such dim people.

Maybe you get my emails. My address is along the lines of emailbikechic... the email part often gets missed off especially if someone actually has to type the address in manually rather than an automatic process via a website. I only found out about an invitation to job interview because my referee had been contacted as well.

I have same! I've had deeds to houses, hospital letters it's so frustrating as I always try to relocate them