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This happens to me all the time. My Gmail is first name and last initial. I'm not sure if the burden here is on Google or those sites that don't verify email address before sending stuff like this, though.

The most fun so far for me was when someone used my email to sign up for Ashley Madison (the affair dating site). Of course, they were compromised a few years later and someone built a tool allowing you to search their users by email. Guess who appeared to be having an affair then? Tough one to explain to someone non technical...

There was a memorable period when one of my namesakes moved into the dorm for his freshman year of college. I was initially confused about the influx of a particular flavor of adult-oriented adverts until the textbook rental invoices started to arrive.

This wasn’t the first time this kid had used my address, and my social media reconnaissance had revealed he was quite the little jerk.

When I got those invoices with his parents contact info, there was a serious temptation to print out and mail a little care package of everything their baby boy had been up to. Alas, life was quite stressful at the time, and I never made the time to follow through.

I sure if you just keep posting stories like this you will get enough cover to show your SO or potential SO that your version of events actually happened instead of what everyone assumes.

Since we're sharing anecdotes... I also have a gmail address with a fairly common name.

1) I've received a bunch of Fw: emails from an Australian person over the years that I ignored as spam. Until he sent a very personal one, inviting me to catch up over beers since it's been so long, at which point I took pity and replied along the lines of "Hello! This is not the address of who you think it is. You're emailing the wrong person. Have a nice day." To which he replied "Lol, nice one!" Eventually the emails stopped.

2) I received a message from a major American company that if I didn't take action urgently, something or other would happen to my requested service. Ok, fine. Then within the next 5 months I've received at least half a dozen emails from them titled "FINAL WARNING: ...", stressing just how important it was for me to acknowledge it. I suspect the company is run by the people behind the Final Destination films or the Final Fantasy games.

I've been getting someone's utility bills, monthly payment reminders, and monthly payment confirmations at myname@gmail.com. I contacted the power company, said they were emailing the wrong person, and asked if they could make the emails stop. Even though I emailed from the account that was receiving the messages, they said they can't change the email preferences since I'm not the account-holder. A nice little Catch-22.

I met the same Catch-22 with PayPal.

GDPR will help you there. Less than 5 minutes and I had it solved.

I receive lots of such emails. In most cases, I just end up with one series of emails from another person who shares my first initial and last name... such as one person's credit card payment emails, another person's cable television bill, another person's sports team updates...

But for about eight years I received numerous emails for some town council member in England. At first, I replied back to explain the misdirected mail, but they kept coming. Meeting minutes. Town council activities. Pamphlet distribution arrangements. A message from a member of the British parliament.

Then one day, I'm not sure what happened, but it must have clicked with them. I received a "test" email addressed to both myself and the actual intended recipient, in which it was explained that they presumed they had the correct address all along because the mail didn't bounce.

After that, the messages stopped. I kind of miss getting them now, but I'm glad they got it all sorted out.

Apparently final fantasy 1 was the Creator's last chance to make a successful game before getting fired from squaresoft

Ive gotten delivery tracking emails to my gmail from Amazon for crap I didn't order sent to an address ive never lived at. Apparently something like this was happening.

What scares the crap out of me is in the last week I've been getting bombarded with Zyrtek (an allergy med) ads. Now, I'd never seen an allergist or been diagnosed with an allergy until 9 days ago. The only person I communicated this to electronically was my father, and over SMS. I've not been researching allergies online, my doc gave me plenty of dead tree material.

So, how do Google and other advertisers know I have an allergy? Are they harvesting SMS as well? Are carriers selling SMS data for targeted advertising? If my health care provider is selling that info, thatd be a HUGE HIPPA violation. (Yes, I'm in the US).

Edit: grammar and clarity of thought.

Maybe your phone's location history at an allergist's office was a hint that you have allergies? I've heard stories about Facebook suggesting friends of friends as "people you may know" after they crossed paths at some location.

It's spring. Everyone gets allergy meds advertised to them in spring.

I visited friends and went along while they went to the pediatrician. I do not have children but after this trip, the Google rewards app asked me if I have children several times immediately afterwards and over the next few months (it had not asked me that question prior to that) so I assume that Google was using either the routers my android phone saw or my location info to figure out where I was to target me for ads.

Android's default SMS app sends your messages to Google to activate the "Quick-reply suggestions" and "Messages for Web" features.

Just checked my pixel's settings cos I freaked out, explicitly says generated on device.

Does it explicitly say texts not sent to Google?

To be fair it does not, but I'd say the implication that it doesn't is strong, In my device menu at least.

The help section it links to omits a statement used in another section, namely the " Copy a code in a message" section note: https://support.google.com/messages/answer/6080324?p=smart_r...

Also possibly the Baader–Meinhof effect [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader%E2%80%93Meinhof_effec...

I got ads for this. I don't have allergies. I got ads for erectile dysfunction, hair loss, maseratis, and ferraris. I'm not in any of the groups interested in these things. I think some of these are either zip targeted, untargeted, or lookalike targeted.

This happened to me. I tried fixing and contacting sites and it just gets worse and worse.

I now try to cancel or change any order I get as that ends up working best to have the real first.last@gmail.com figure it out. It’s also amazing how many sites let you do important stuff like change airline tickets without login and how many sites never confirm email.

I spent two years with Uber trying to fix someone using my email and driving. I would get password reset emails all the time, but I couldn’t use them because they had their phone as two factor. Really frustrating.

You've been changing people's airline tickets just for typing the wrong email address?? I hope that's hyperbole, otherwise that's awful.

Get enough of these, and you have to wonder just how stupid people can be if they can't even get their own email address correct.

I signed up for gmail years ago, and got my firstname.lastname@gmail.com address. I don't use it at all [1] so any email I get there is spam or a mistake. I've sent out countless "this isn't the person you thing it is" emails to car dealerships, sporting events, random strangers sending me family photos, etc. It's simply amazing how often this happens.

[1] I run my own email server on my own domain. I got gmail.com just to see how their email client worked, back when they first announced it.

Same exact problem here. I get unbelievable amounts of emails intended for other people who share my name, including once a scanned copy of a passport. There's a special place in hell for services that not only don't validate email, but also require you to login to unsubscribe.

I get some wild stuff in my relatively common firstLast@gmail.com that I’ve had since 2004.

Most memorable was an invite to a Man U friendly in Hong Kong, including a seat in a luxury box. I wrote back and was like you got the wrong guy but can I go? They wrote back and said sure if you can get to HK by Thursday. As a passport-less college student, I couldn’t swing it.

Another time, somebody with my name was some kind of assistant to a congressperson. I got an email that said, “We have something for the senator, where should we send it?” I gave them my address (in Portland, OR) and hoped I would end up in some kind of political thriller situation. Ended up being some dumb poster lol.

If you're an American, you wouldn't have needed a passport to get to Hong Kong! That doesn't solve the issue of airfare though :/

Where’d you get the idea a passport isn’t needed?

https://www.worldtravelguide.net/guides/asia/china/hong-kong...

I'm currently receiving medical bills from some overseas hospital. I get a power bill from some guy in Ohio. I'm part of a family's frequent vacation emails. There's some woman named Deborah whose Verizon bill I get alerted about. On the GSuite side of things, I have a catch-all account for a domain I own that receives real estate documents every day of the year.

So many people have provided my GMail as their own that its and endless stream of missed communications and noise. Worse yet - apparently it's distorting the profile Google (and whatever other government agencies track this stuff) have built about me.

I have <common last name>@gmail.com and it's unusable. I've had it since you could only get a gmail account via invite. I've mostly stopped using it except I have a quite a few android apps purchased with the account and you can't transfer them.

I have a unique name that no one else on earth has, and I'm usually envious of people with common names, as there is no where for me to hide on the internet, but then I see stories like yours and remember that it's not all bad.

For me one of these sorts of situations, it got so bad I started cancelling flights and hotel reservations as they came in. That gave the person who had the errant email address enough incentive to actually fix it.

you should have written an article about it, it's an obvious security hole in the airlines' systems.

If that's true you're a terrible person.

Oh we were nice enough about it, we even tracked down what the person's "actual" email address was and tried to get them to change it. They not only were they unwilling to fix it with the places they had given it out they added more. So it wasn't like they felt compelled to be helpful. And of course it isn't really possible to "junk" emails from legitimate businesses to your email that you might want to do business with at some point.

Not really. Not when the amount of emails is big, and people refuse to fix things on their end.

Meanwhile, I don't have a common name, but there are at least a few of us out there.

So when I get something like that, I get to immediately go into "My credit card has been compromised mode".

I've found the same, especially having just a <firstname><number> gmail. On top of just the various receipts and booking and what have you, I've noticed my email being used for what I think are probably fake accounts setup by either the company or their marketing firm. I had Wells Fargo email me shit about some bank account for the the longest time, and I could never get rid of the emails, tried calling them saying this email doesn't have a back account with you etc etc. Turns out a few years later they got busted with creating fake accounts. I bet some hack at the company just put my first name for the email in the fake account they created, and bam, I get spam from them. Now I'm suspicious every time I get email from an account I didn't create for AT&T or some larger company, and I always wonder whats a typo, and what company is trying to pump their numbers... Or the kid who used my email for his Fortnight account. Yeah, I wiped out his account once I tried signing on for the first time, and got messages saying I never confirmed my email...

Add me to the list of people with the same problem. I actually paid for a Gmail invite when it was first launched so I could get my preferred address for my extremely common name. Oops.

It’s extremely frustrating. At least once a week there’s an attempt by someone to recover my email address as they think it’s theirs.

My SO gets these also. One of the people with the same first and last name as her is a government official and has inadvertently forwarded confidential information once or twice. My name is unusual enough that this doesn't happen with Gmail, but I do own a domain that's one letter different from an American local government domain, so I receive emails with misspelled addresses from them every few months.

Google’s automation with calendar auto-adding events from email and not correcting is so bad that I switched to macOS/iOS Calendar and started weening myself off of Google’s services.

They’ve had issues for years, and don’t seem interested in ficin

>I own a first.last@gmail.com address

Isn't this a security hole? Even if I don't know your password, just knowing your address means I know your first and last name. Now I got 3 pieces of information that can be used to social engineer my way through tech support.

This happened to me a few years ago. Due to the volume of (danish) email I would get for this other guy it became impossible to actually use in any real sense.

I had no real choice but to create a new (and more esoteric) email address

Ugh, I had something similar happen to my gmail account. My name is apparently similar enough to some Swedish venture capitalist's that my email account got added to a startup incubator's spam list. That account now gets regular elevator pitches and invitations to investment raises, and even though I tell each individual spammer to take me off their list, it's obviously still on the master list somewhere because it keeps happening. Eventually I retired that account for other reasons but it's probably still getting spammed to this day.

Wow. If they really connect transactions and people by name that would be super amateurish. It just shows that no single entity should have that much data because the bigger they get it will be more and more likely that people will do stupid things. There is no way around it.

I don’t think that’s what’s going on. I think it’s like this:

GP’s email address is john.doe@gmail.com

Lots of people are named John Doe, and some of them think their email address is john.doe@gmail.com

When those people buy something online, they (incorrectly) provide their email address as john.doe@gmail.com

Emails about the products purchased end up going to GP

Google shows GP information about products that show up in his email

meh, years ago quite a few retail stores started asking for your email after a purchase. I would wager there is a sizable subset that a) didn't want to give their real email, b) but were too polite to decline, (as the cashier would ask "what's your email", and it wouldn't sound like an option) and so c) just gave a fake/dummy email that somewhat relates to their real name.

Ok. I misread. So people are basically mistyping their own E-mail?

There must be some psychological treat that many people just enter <name>.<surname>@gmail.com from laziness, carelessness, or treating the address as a black hole? This happens too often all around the world.