I have the email address stuttle at gmail. It’s an old account that I haven’t really used in years but I keep it around just in case I need to dig out an old email or have used it to register with a site I’ve forgotten about. Mostly it just gets spam so I tend to ignore it.
However, in the past few years I’ve started to regularly receive emails destined for other people.
Some, but not all, are people just typing email addresses incorrectly. We all know that a missing or incorrect character here or there is all it takes for an email to get lost or go to the wrong person. The idiotic part is that most are the result of people, probably very few individual people, but people not giving out the correct email address.
In the beginning
For a while it was understandable things. Many people don’t know that Gmail removed punctuation from email addresses such that s.tuttle will go to the same place as stuttle. This was the first thing that started happening. At first I replied to them to tell the sender to ask the intended recipient for their correct email address. I don’t remember every getting a response to these.
The ramp-up
Then it happened. I got an email for a Sandra Tuttle from an airline. AN AIRLINE! She had actually entered my email address when buying a flight. As my mind mulled over the huge fun I could have had I been a more malicious actor I dutifully found a customer service email address for the airline and emailed them the flight number and the passenger details to let them know. I heard nothing back.
Next it was a realtor. I started getting house listings in Seattle. No full name on these, just a Dear Sarah. Again I replied and that one did actually respond to thank me for letting them know.
Following that there were order confirmations from Walmart, pizza order confirmations from Domino’s, and more.
But then…
Then it got personal
I started getting family photos. I was included on long recipient lists for emails confirming church meetings, dinner plans, and more. I replied to a few of these, including everyone else on the recipient list. Most did not get a response but one particularly amusing reply did come: “Stop kidding around.” Okay.
Some of my replies became a little, err, choice. I got more than one response telling me I had overreacted. It was probably once for them, but for me it was the hundreth time. It’s incredibly frustrating - the account has become less than useless.
And now…
Well, now I just delete them, mostly automatically. The account has filter than deletes any email not specifically addressed to stuttle. That still leaves a few that get through but it gets far more hits than misses.
And I still don’t understand how people don’t know what their own email address is!