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Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

I get something similar. I was an early adopter of a popular email service, so I managed to get <firstname><lastname>@<emailservice>.com. Pretty neat, pretty simple, right? Except I have a really common name, and people seem think that if the email address has their name in it, it must be their email address. I get sign-ups for Facebook all the time. I get emails about credit scores that make me panic until I realize I didn't sign up for that service. The other day I got an appointment reminder to take my Vauxhall into the shop for service (I live in the US, we don't have Vauxhall here).

Email is hard and confusing for a lot of people. It's easy for us to forget that.

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I'm amazed how many people get their email address wrong. I have <firstname>.<lastname>@gmail.com, which is fine, and hardly gets any mail meant for someone else. <firstletter><lastname>@gmail.com however, is basically unusable. Funny thing is, the latter was the one I created first, but I forgot the password so had to create the other. I managed to recover it later and I'm glad I have the former.

Sort of off topic, but did you know that the '.' gets ignored in gmail addresses, you can remove it or add extras and you will still get the email.

And you can also interchange `gmail` and `googlemail`, append `+anything` to alias.

It's a slippery slope though - forget worrying about remembering or managing passwords, you have to deal with variations of an email address too.

Further, email clients will reply from whatever address you used to setup the client. Maybe you can add aliases, but that will be time-consuming, and even where supported there's usually a single-digit limit. This can cause real headaches - e.g. "reply with `UNSUBSCRIBE` in the subject line to be removed from this list" and being unable to reply from the right email address.

This is true in general, but some of the very early Gmail addresses do differentiate based on the '.'

For instance, my very early-adopter Gmail address has a '.' in the address but it is an entirely different account from the one without. If you send mail to the one without the '.' I do not receive it.

God I love edge cases / grandfathering

I have a <firstletter><lastname>@gmail.com and I get everything from online shopping receipts to legal notices. You'd be amazed at just how uninterested a law firm is in knowing they just sent a bunch of legal correspondence to someone who isn't their client.

I have <lastname>@gmail.com because I'm an early adopter (TM). My mailbox is almost unusable.

I've got my nick doubled as gmail account. Guess how many stray mails in moonspeak I get on a regular basis from China, Brazil and other weirdo locales?

I have a <firstletter><lastname>, my lastname is very uncommon but it turns out that someone in another country has the same first name and last name and you can get my email by googling my name. So, I have received few emails for him and kindly replied that I wasn't him.

I have a very uncommon name (3 of us in the country, as far as I can tell), and this happened to me for the first time this weekend. Someone bought a stereo at Best Buy 500 miles from me and gave them my email (<firstname><lastname>@gmail.com) for the Geek Squad protection plan. I thought someone had stolen my credit card until I realized what happened.

Someone signed up with my email address on to hotmail and then a couple of months later hit "forgotpassword", attempted changing the password multiple times, then got in and changed the email address. I got so sick and worried that I got hacked. Turns out they selected the wrong email address when signing for hotmail, and then changed the address to the correct one.

it threw me in circles.

I have something of a young name which is also uncommon, not many people over 30 with it, when I was young I googled my full name and got only one result, today when I google myself I find a ton of people who are usually my age or younger.

There aren't a lot of people who are using my email, one is an older folk who uses it, and I always mean to contact him, and one was a DJ which accidentally used my email address instead of his.

Yup :(

My email is <first name><middle initial>@gmail.com (six characters total) and I get about 1-1.5 misdirected emails per day. Receipts, phone bills, homework, meeting minutes, personal messages that someone passed away, angry email from a homeowner to his general contractor (in Botswana), and even a international love letter.

It's quite annoying, but the worst is sites that make it very hard to unsubscribe, or don't understand that it's possible for someone to enter an email address that doesn't belong to them in a form. In one case (a bank), I actually had to call customer service on the phone to get them to disassociate my email address with someone's account.

In the case of the love letter, I thought I should reply to say that the intended recipient didn't get the message, but when I did, the sender got really confused and didn't understand that she had mis-typed the address.

Good thing you're not sucked into the systems of UPS. They refuse to talk to anyone not the sender or receiver.

I've got an annual delivery of an expensive watch in my inbox like clockwork every year.

I have <firstname>@alum.wellknownuniversity.edu. Apparently I was early on in getting an alumni forwarding address. It hasn't happened in a while but I used to regularly get emails for other people--including, for a time, board meeting notices and info for some company or other. (I did send a reply to the effect that maybe they shouldn't be sending these to me but never got a response.)

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1279/

I have the same problem with gmail. 90% of the email I get to my gmail account is for someone else.

I'd stop using that account in a second, except I bought ~$100 worth of Android apps over the years using that email address and last time I looked I couldn't transfer them to a new account.

The English NHS has a similar problem.

firstname.lastname AT nhs dot net

Or firstname.lastnameNUMBER if there's more than one person with your name.

Since the NHS is one of the largest employers in the world you'll find things like john.doe58@

It sucks.

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