@jerry I have the same issue. Someone even mailed me passport scans of herself, husband and children from her work address.

Do unto others as you would like them to do unto you I suppose, although it’s very annoying :)

@jerry If you call or text, don't do so from your own phone number.

I recommend marking these as spam to affect the sender's reputation. That hits at the societal problem of accepting unvalidated email addresses as valid.

@jerry My sympathies. I have that quite often. Once a whole care taking schedule including medication and everything, with personal details of all the care givers and patient. House buying contracts, new kitchen contracts, cars being sold etc. If there's a way to contact people, I do. But it's quite annoying. And they are never from my country...

Most hilarious are those from lawyers that say you should delete them if you're not the correct recipient. Yeah, that's gonna work. 🙄

@jerry

If it's not life threatening, please delete it.

At least this sender (medical facility) adds this to their mails:

"If you are not the intended recipient of this email or received this in error, please immediately and permanently delete this email."

@jerry I'm not the only one. Hooray...

Anything official-looking, I try to reach out and tell the sender. If it's something like signing up for a Walmart account, I "break in" to the account and change the email to a temporary address (so I can handle the validation).

I refuse to feel bad about this, because I'm not the one who screwed up. If you're signing up and can't get your address right, too bad. I don't do anything malicious, no canceling orders or ordering other stuff, etc. Just get my address out.

@jerry

Contact that realtor directly and explain the email address they have is incorrect.

If they fail to correct then block and/or report as spam.

I have the same issue with a chap in Australia who thinks my Gmail is his 🙄

He's wrong of course, so I contact the business sender(s) to let them know.

Many jurisdictions do have data protection and integrity rules and regulations, so this shouldn't be a different task for those businesses to comply 🙂

@jerry I have a OneNote page filled with data on my doppelgangers. Funny enough, the one thing I don't have for these people is the accurate email address. When it's medical appointments, I usually call the office and tell them if the mistake. The worst was a delivery service that didn't respect opt out, so I called. CSRs do not have a play book for "I want to delete my account but I don't know if I'm in FL or PA"

Worst one was "my" agent sending me theatrical scripts (I'm also an actor).

@jerry I was getting Jaquie Lawson animated holiday e-cards from a doppelgänger's elderly parents for _years_. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Halloween, Father's Day, Easter, etc — just about every holiday listed on the calendar.

I responded back a few times to let them know I was not their son, but that didn't work. So I began expecting the cards from them at every holiday, imagining myself as the other Brad Larsen with different parents.

The cards stopped coming a couple years ago...

@jerry I'm paul.hoffman@gmail, and there are a zillion other Paul Hoffmans who either misspell their own email addresses, or say them on the phone and the other person gets it close.

If it seems at all important, I reply. If I get something with a phone number, I call. It has made a huge difference to some Paul Hoffmans.

@jerry

Well, this does mean that Google AI training on "your email" is quite confused about your location, gender, marital status, and travel plans.

I had this happen to me once with someone in England who signed up for some parking payment system. Thankfully they got a clue.
Similar story:
My cellphone number is 1 digit different from a number that SEARS used to advertise. One year I logged 60 calls, including one panicking elderly woman in the south telling me about how all her frozen goods were going to rot if the new freezer wasn't delivered soon. I called that person and left a message about how they misdialed. Another time I kept getting called by the same person. Eventually I visited the local SEARS and spoke with a manager ... they had programmed their cash registers to print out my exact number as the one the call.
Paul harvey page 2, they are out of business now.

Now my Email addresses are no longer just my firstname at short domain, god I miss those days. Alas, my japanese ISP ceased providing services and that's how I moved to google.

Advice: Delete messages. Unsubscribe from unwanted messages. Delete PHI/PII messages. Consider an alternative Email and write rules to forward the good stuff there via approvedsender lists?

@jerry I get that occasionally, I've tracked down contact info for the ones that seemed important (nurse continuing education certificates, small business whose accountant set up credit card processing so I was getting their daily summaries) and just unsubscribe from the rest.

My expectation is that the correct addresses for those people are my address but with trailing digits and someone had numlock off.

@jerry I usually log into the account, change the email to a throwaway and change the password.

I’ve been saving all of mine. Think I’ll write a book some day.

@jerry

It happens to me, a lot. With each one, I attempt to get the sender to sort it out, the first time. Phoning them would be nice, but I don't like phoning strangers. If it keeps happening, I unsubscribe them...

@jerry e transfer is a Canadian money transfer by Interac, integrated into all of our banks. Money instantly transfers from one account to another.

A law firm routinely sends legitimate e-transfers of sizeable 4 digit amounts to an email I own, which has one character too many in the domain separating me from their intended recipient.

The first 3 times I replied telling them to update the address, now I just get the transfer notifications and ignore them. It’s been >2 years.

After this experience, my default unexpected -> ignore policy applies to every email, even if they’re seemingly legitimate.

@jerry I have had this problem many, many times.

For a while someone in the Australian government was sending me personnel disciplinary files. I have reached out to this person and explained her error, but her ability to consistently recall her personal email address remains iffy. :(

There was a young woman in Florida who kept using my email address as a junk email for her various purchases, and one of them had an accurate phone number associated. So I called up and spoke to her mother and explained to her how to set up a secondary email account for junk signups that she still maintained control of. These signups stopped.

There is someone in Ohio who uses my email address, but from having talked to her son[*] I know she has dementia and I just let that one go.

There is a horndog in the UK who uses my email address for Chaturbate and dating sites. For the dating site, I reset the password, changed the account email address to my junk account, and rewrote his dating profile. :)

It turns out there really is a OnlyFans for feet! I know this because someone used my email address to set up a creator account. But before I could reset the password, the account had been banned for ToS violations! What did they do, post pictures of hands?!? 😂

[*] This is ... a story. Her son kept initiating some process to seize control of my Apple Id. One of those emails from Apple support included his phone number, so I called him up, claiming to be Apple support and that we had researched the account and that it definitely wasn't his mother's and that I was closing out the ticket. After some initial huffiness, he told me about his mother's dementia and that he was trying to figure out her online accounts. I spent a few minutes telling him ways he might retrieve that information. At the end, he thanked Apple support for the assistance. :)

@jerry There are 5 persons named Martin Seeger in the world (which I know of).

Sometimes I get their vacation pictures, a debt collector wants money pronto or an unknown woman tells me my relationship with her is coming to an end.

I usually write an answer to the sender, they got the wrong email. Rinse and repeat. Polite to the woman (who was probably stressed out already), as impolite as I can be without crossing into penal law to the debt collector. Something in between for others, increasingly angry with repeated offenders.

If the mail went to multiple people, I use group replies.

I am very glad, I don’t have a very common last name (my generation is full of guys called Martin thanks to a popular book in the 60s).

@jerry there's a woman in Bradford called Amanda with the same unusual surname as me who has registered for all sorts of retail shit with my email address, I had receipts and collection notices for all sorts but it stopped a few years ago
Shame, it was vaguely entertaining.

On a similar note, we've not plugged in our landline phone in over ten years. Its got a repeated number and we used to get calls for the hospital, pizza, taxis...

@jerry Had that happen, as well as something similar and almost as annoying: when your email address gets on so many spammer/scammer lists that you keep getting lots of those messages — from ever-changing From addresses.

I generally recommend habitually going in and blocking every From address of every unwanted message, then trashing themessage. Yes, tiresome, but at least you shouldn’t see more from those addresses.

Eventually, you may want to trash the affected email address and start using a new one instead.

That’s harder than you might want to believe if you haven’t done it before (which you may have it you came to depend upon using employer-provided email — until you changed jobs). It is really difficult to notify EVERY person and account (that you use the email address as a reference or identifier for) that you need to!

Planning for that ahead of time can help:
1. Get a domain (that you can manage the DNS for).
2. Get a business or family account at your favorite email provider (that you can create users for), and associate the domain to it.
3. Make the first email user of that account the email account manager (and go back and make it the domain manager as well). Use it for nothing else. Fix up the DNS with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records referencing the sending SMTP servers of your email provider so that you (and only you) can actually send email from your domain.
4. Create at least one more user account and use it for everything else (as your public emal address(es), for accounts and apps, etc., etc.) Keep track of every place you use it — so you can trash it in the future if you have to. Optionally: create aliases and give those out instead of the real usernames — being sure to keep track of where and when you use those. A password manager will be useful keeping pairwise track of email addresses/aliases and passwords.
5. If you ever need to ditch that email username, creating a new username on the same service with the same domain is less painful than changing services. Alternatively, you can swap the domain with a new one (being sure to also change the SPF, DKIM and DMARC records to match). Also, if you ever want to change email provider, that’s real easy: just move the domain over to your new email provder — where you’ve duplicated the domain names (tho you’ll still have SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records to change).

[Moving accumulated stored mail is left as an exercise!-]

@jerry I get this too. Since it’s tied to *MY* email address I do a password reset then request the account is closed if I can or contact the company who sent the email and tell them to stop bothering me.

There’s one guy somewhere who keeps booking an oil change on his pickup truck. They offer the ability to cancel it via a link on the email.

Poor guy has probably had about 8 appointments cancelled by now. 🤣

@jerry I rarely (and no longer) initiate contact, and mostly just delete the emails.

I was fortunate, or so I thought to get an invite in 2006 by someone using gmail at the time, and I signed up with my first.lastname and now I get emails for namesakes who were discontent with first.lastname.42 or something. Every email mispelled I end up getting.

I used to think there wasa a moral thing to do, I no longer thinks so