a rant to the world at large

I own several Gmail addresses, in various iterations of my legal name and my nethandles. I have owned them since the first day that Gmail addresses were available to someone not actually working at Google, because I was one of the people who got an invite that first day from a friend who was working at Google.

Apparently there are a quite a lot of people who assume that they are the only person in the world who would ever want to use one of those names, and who hand out the Gmail address to assorted individuals and websites without checking that they actually have access to said Gmail address. Usually I just mutter quietly and unsubscribe/delete/reply "Dude, I'm not your friend, update your address book" as appropriate, but the last fortnight's crop of misdirected idiocies include:

--legal contracts that really, really shouldn't have been sent by email without triple-checking the address
--medical records, ditto
--the complete weekly shift work pattern for somewhere plus sufficient contact details for some of the names included that would doubtless be quite useful to certain types of unpleasant people
--access details for someone's online shopping account that I think might have allowed me to order goods on their credit card (I was disinclined to look around to check)

I have more and more sympathy for the policy at $WORK that we will not send files to outside email addresses on pain of disciplinary proceedings. :-(