I get emails from an army guy who thinks it's a good idea to cc his own gmail account on messages from his army.mil account. Except he's using my old gmail address from when I had a boring old married name that is all common unlike my rad current name.
The stuff is only classified some of the time, and never more than Secret, so at least there's that. One time I emailed him and I was like, hey! I'm not you. And don't mail classified stuff to gmail anyway. Did not help.
Yeah, it's increasingly looking like I have a stupid person name. It is a clean early adopter Gmail address, but so is Matlock's and he doesn't get the volume and persistence that I do. Plus, actually now that I think about it, I have three pretty clean ones and they only come to my main username. It's weird, too, how people act all suspicious like I'm somehow hacking someone's account or something when I try to explain to them that they have the wrong email address.
Also, I had to get my email address banned from Disney because that stupid kid kept flooding my email with confirmations from all these stupid kid sites at a billion different domains so I couldn't just blacklist them.
I don't think I've ever received email for a different Joe P.
The obvious conclusion is that lots of people are receiving mail intended for me. (But not from places where I've entered my address wrong. We aren't as dumb as your namesakes.)
The most annoying part is that despite my name being quite uncommon, someone had already taken firstname.lastname version of my name on Gmail!
So I had to settle for firstname.middleinitial.lastname. But perhaps I should've tried for firstinitial.lastname instead (my brother got that).
The only time anything like this happened to me is when I was part of a program for gifted children from Duke University (basically, middle schoolers take the SAT and those with high scores get some recognition or whatever, I forget what they actually did). They sent stuff meant for me to another guy with the same first and last name in Florida, who I'm guessing was not a middle schooler anymore. Which was also highly unexpected.
For the purposes of this post, imagine my name is like, Luigi Tramontozzi, since my last name is similarly long and extremely Italian.
I made a portmanteau out of my first, middle and last name. It's generally available wherever I go. The only side effect is that it's a little weird for professional use (not that I let that dissuade me) and it can sound like I'm trying to be edgy if you read it a certain way. Fortunately, I've never gotten email that wasn't meant for me, not even accidentally added as a cc or bcc. I also have maybe half a dozen other fake accounts for various purposes and none of them have been life-hacked by other people. None of them are proper names either so I bet that helps.
Never. Obviously it does happen to you, but I am mystified how it can unless someone has access to your password. Aren't email addresses supposed to be unique?
Same... has never happened to me, but then again I never user anything resembling my real name as part of an email address (when I can avoid it, i.e. not work related).
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The best way to make America great is to lower the standards!
No one uses my e-mail, but they use my phone and home address all the time. Which wouldn't be so annoying if map sites didn't agree with them.
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"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
Oh yeah, I get all kinds of snail mail for my neighbors because I live in a flat where they started real numbers and then added A, B, C etc. so I have Ymirsbloodstreet Realnumber and they all have Ymirsbloodstreet Realnumber A etc. I get all the crap mail from lazy assholes who can't be bothered to add the letter after the number.
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"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
You would not believe the number of PR shills I get emailing me asking me to blog about their incredibly lame infographics. Best diamonds! Top 10 military disasters! Best doors! Okay that last one I seriously considered. They were pretty great doors.
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