I have this problem also! I thought it was rare. In my case I think the person is very bad with computers and doesn't know what their email address is. I've gotten emails from their bank, cell phone, and even online dating. I tried mailing them a letter once to tell them they are making a mistake but nothing changed.
There are other stories of people forgetting which company it was with (gmail vs yahoo) and even of google accidentally giving out emails with a period and then silently removing periods.
It's not a super-common lastname, but there are probably several hundred people with it in the US.
I get all sorts of email for people whose address is some variant of it, like <firstname.lastname>@gmail.com. I've gotten plane tickets, paypal payments, cancer diagnoses, Bar Mitzvah and Wedding invitations, college transcripts, all sorts of personal information.
In many cases, I don't think it's the fault of the person with the email; I think they give their email as "firstname.lastname@gmail.com" and some clerk just uses "lastname@gmail.com"
Someone registered their brand new truck to my email address. I started getting a ton of automated email regarding the truck. The manufacturer didn't offer any options whatsoever to disentangle myself from that account. I even filled their support form and asked them to phone call the owner and sort it out. The only thing that did work was installing their app and honking the (parked) car horn from the other side of the world. A couple of days later, the account was magically deactivated and spam stopped.
One day I decided to take action and sent a expletive filled email to them telling them that I was not the person they thought I was and to stop emailing me.
They then sent me an email telling me I was fired.
My every day email is my name@myname.com, and I’ve had to purchase several typo domains and alias them.
It shouldn't be this easy to use someone else's email address.
Ask me how I know :( PP money was not recoverable that one time my ex sent it to the wrong email address.
Thankfully it was only $500 bucks or so, not $45,000.
>It shouldn't be this easy to use someone else's email address.
This though, seems hard. I don't think this is a "security" thing per se (though I dearly wish there was a modernized "email" system built with modern crypto from the ground up). But for any sort of communications at all it seems like there is an inherent tension between how low friction one wants for the world to communicate vs protection. Like, there is nothing stopping anyone from doing a pure whitelist system for email right now. I even do in fact do that for a few accounts like specific ones for client contacts, only active client addresses will be accepted everything else is blackholed. Those obviously receive zero spam or misuse of any kind [0]. But obviously the tradeoff for that is no new potential clients could ever "cold call" it either. One could imagine technical solutions like "only accept stranger email from accounts with a signed ID" or "vouched for by known address" (ie, WoT) or "only address with a signed time token >N from providers X, Y or Z", or some kind of challenge/response, but all would have privacy tradeoffs, complexity, and still wouldn't inherently do anything about honest mistakes.
We could have more powerful options for this, but it'd still involve subjective tradeoffs between how open to new communications one wants to be vs cutting down on noise. No one right answer there.
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0: Forged from fields are of course possible but in practice someone would at the least have to know which handful of the total planetary email addresses were whitelisted, never mind flags that show up in the headers from that
I have a very common english <firstname><lastname>@outlook.com address. My inbox is always full of bank statements, invoices, and all sorts of business correspondence and bills from all over the world.
It made the address unusable.
Looks like it is popular among some ethnic groups.
I get applications for waitress for Black Lion Pub in the middle of the England, tons of registrations to any and each popular service which doesn't require e-mail validation, receipts from all around the world for online purchases (from dresses to drugs to surgical treatment of cats and dogs). I don't mention registrations in several recruitment agencies for low-wage workers ("I" was offered positions of forklift operator, gas station worker, etc).
There was whole year+, when PA of some real estate agency in Florida used this e-mail to book airline tickets and hotels for her boss. It was at least a trip each week, all around Florida and neighboring states. I've wrote to hotels, I've wrote to public e-mail of this agency - to no success. I've cancelled these bookings - they were re-booked, sometimes for much higher price. One time Ive canceled non-refundable booking for hotel 6 times in a row. It was re-booked each time, nothing changed! In the end I've filtered out all messages addressed to this person (name was always the same, it is what allowed me to figure out firm & person). After year or year and the half it stopped.
Gmail: A lot of people seem to think email, then "Gmail". I get emails of at-least 4 (or is it 5) people who have used some variation and also exact ID of my Gmail account (created when it came out in beta). I get details of their Credit Card, Bank, Phone, and what not. I just ignore/delete them but someone with time and fun/bad intention can do some serious harm. I have tried sending emails, contacting them few times but to no good result. One got angry that I have access to "his email". From the mail history, I feel really sorry for them. They are definitely not well-off and I feel I should protect this part of their digital identity. :-)
2. They gave that as their email (Gmail) ID when the banks, ISPs, asked and the institutes never validated it. To the other Brajeshwars, they are like "Oh! Email/Gmail, then it must be brajeshwar@gmail.com." But then I end up getting their emails.
My name is also uncommon but it's very English, so I get weird email from England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand—anywhere there was an Anglo diaspora. I've given up trying to do anything about it, and it really isn't a problem because the volume is very low.
I have tried sending emails, contacting them few times but to no good result.
As someone who's had this same Gmail address for 18 years, I'm here to tell you it is absolutely a pointless waste of your time and almost never results in the sender changing their address book, workflow, or typing skills.
It was hard to filter it at first since people kept exploring areas of the trial that generated novel message templates and the messages seemed to come from an endless supply of unique hosts.
At one point I contacted the SaaS company about it but they told me there was "nothing they could do" even when I promised I was the only user at that domain and I had no intent to sign up to their service with it.
I used to just log into their trial and delete the account, but while trying to automate this I figured out a better way to do my filters so the emails don't really bug me anymore (except in the cases when someone picks an alias I already have in use).
I think it's a mix of room temperature IQ and Main Character syndrome thinking they're the only ones with their own name (especially if it's common)