Email mishaps: 12 tales of mistaken identity

It seems Alex Hern isn't the only one accidentally stealing people's identities online. Here are your tales of mistaken identity via email

There's some guy living in the Pacific NW who has apparently spent the last three years thinking his email address is my email address.

I get *so* much stuff for this guy, I can more or less plot a vague outline of his month-to-month life at this point. He works as some sort of freelance consultant, and I wonder how it's going because he's presumably missed a number of important meetings, updates and debriefings in the last 24 months, owing to the fact that I get updates about them rather than him. He's also been having a lot of renovations on his house in the last year, and much as I'd like to confirm Tuesday would be a good time for the roofer to drop by for a quote, I can't, because I live 4500 miles away and don't know if he's free on Tuesday - the same reason I can't confirm that his air conditioning unit was delivered last week, or that it's ok for his party of four booking at a local restaurant on Friday to be pushed back an hour. He appears to be having difficulty selling his former property; I'm not that surprised.

@alexhern My best friend has a common name as well as me, we're discussing your article pic.twitter.com/MtFfptdh8c

The most disturbing one was from a (well known) UK solicitor who was handling the divorce of his client and there was a lot of money involved. I replied immediately and pointed out their mistake. A few weeks later the same, again I replied.
And again. This time I called the solicitor directly and told him if he doesn't get his act together I will inform his client. After all he did not only provide details of physical abuse, bank statements, her whereabouts (she was in a "safe house") to a complete stranger who is aware that her husband is looking for her and is pretty loaded; but also his intended tactics.
I then received an email from him trying to intimidate him and suggesting I broke the law for reading emails which are not addressed to me.
I printed out the emails, send it to his client with a letter assuring her that I have no malicious intention but want to protect her (I was going through a divorce myself at that time and could sympathise with her worries) and suggested she should change her solicitor. Which she did.
A***ole

@alexhern My name is much more common in the States than here - the best misaddressed email I ever got was this one pic.twitter.com/bWs4CpyfMh

I feel your pain.

Having the name Richard Thomas and living in Wales, a nation not renowned for its wide variety of surnames, I get this a lot.

@alexhern my favourite alt-me is the sheriff from the US who orders cars parts and signs up to hook-up websites to cheat on his fiance.

As a university student, every few months I receive emails addressed to one of my lecturers who shares the same first name as me, but whose surname is completely different. The contents of the emails have ranged from other students on my course asking me questions about material covered in lectures (of which I have no real authority on) to academics congratulating me on the publication of papers I hadn't written.

When I receive such emails, I make sure to forward it on to my lecturer, copying it to the original sender in the hopes that they won't repeat their mistake. I am a bit puzzled as to why this keeps happening though. Do people simply enter my lecturer's first name and department into the directory search facility and pick the first option on the list? That seems to me like a rather foolish thing to do. Perhaps my university should offer a course on the proper use of email.

@alexhern A friend once got congrats on his (non existent) upcoming wedding and so told his "friend' it was off as his fiance was cheating.

@alexhern @chrisapplegate For ages I was cc'd (not bcc'd) in on all the correspondence of the Arkansas chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Lol.

For several YEARS I had mailerdaemon as my account at comcast.net. You are saying "so what?" What happens when you send an email and you typo the name? You get an email saying: "I'm sorry that address doesn't exist -- signed mailer daemon." That email is generated by your mail provider BUT they make up a return address for it. They forge the address. And so some isps would forge mailerdaemon at comcast when comcast would bounce the message. "So what" you say, "is this going to end with Tree Fiddy?" Nope. There are idiots out there who REPLY to those bounce messages with questions like: "why didn't you deliver my message" yeah I may have trolled a few people.

@alexhern Every few years I'm bombarded with emails from people standing for the election in North Carolina.

There is some guy in America with a name similar to mine who a) is desperate to find a girlfriend, and b) doesn't know his own email address. Whether these are related is a matter of debate, but nonetheless has resulted in me getting a steady stream of emails from various dating agencies thanking me for signing up and offering me various possible matches.

Dealing with this has ranged from the amusing to the infuriating. In some cases,a simple unsubscribe has stopped them. In a couple of cases, I've logged on to the site (well, it's my email address, so I get to reset the password) and changed "my" profile to be about as unattractive as it can possibly be. One site didn't allow me to unbsubscribe or change the profile, so instead I changed the email address and redirected the new one to the site's founder.