a rant to the world at large

[julesjones]

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. :-(

Comments

[glitterboy1]

Or maybe they actually do have an e-mail address already, and have just plain got it wrong. I'm not sure which is more foolish.

[julesjones]

Some of this is undoubtedly typos, particularly of the type where someone has an address with a number on the end, and has forgotten to put on the number. (I have the number-free version courtesy of being among the first to get invite codes, which is why I get so much of this stuff.) But over the last couple of weeks, I've also had a fair number of password retrieval attempts sent to the not-Gmail address linked to the account, with a timing which is pretty suggestive of someone having given a site my Gmail address, logging in to pick up their order details, and discovering that they *can't* log in -- and not realising that the reason for this is that it's not their address.

I suspect that part of the problem here is that as far as Gmail is concerned, all variations of dots within an address are one identical account, and ditto with the Gmail and Googlemail namespaces. Thus I use jules.jones@gmail, but this also give me control of julesjones@gmail and jules.jones@googlemail and julesjones@googlemail -- but the "set up an account" page at Gmail used to be not very clear on the "does this already exist?" checker if someone tried one of the subsidiary versions, and they thought they'd successfully set up an account using that version when they hadn't. The checker is much better now, but there are probably still a number of people out there with the wrong address in their address book as a result of old attempts.

[mishalak]

I didn't know I controlled all those other email addresses as well.. Good to know! I got to my legal name before anyone else. If I'd been thinking clearly I would have got my father's legal name as well so when he finally joined me on google he'd have a good one.

[julesjones]

I did get my dad's name (quite something, since it's a very common one), but he failed to use it, and someone else got it because he hadn't logged in for six months.

[jhall1]

It;s amazing how stupid people can be. At one time eight or so years ago I started getting emails for various people @jhall.co.uk. It seems that some UK company called J Hall must have been under the impression that rthey own that domain. I politely replied to the people sending the emails (after all it wasn't their fault; they were presumable just using the address that they had been given by the company for the people they were trying to contact) telling them that it wasn't the right address. I don't think I got many "thank you" mesages in response. Eventually it must have been sorted out, as the emails stopped.

[kalypso]

I get a quite a few phone calls (especially August-September) from people trying to contact a school outfitter with my surname (no relation as far as I know). But they are usually quite apologetic when I point out that they're looking in the residential section of the telephone directory, and they ought to try the business section. I never got these calls until BT had the bright idea of having two sections in one volume.

[julesjones]

I have a vague recollection of people talking about such a problem in a Demon newsgroup, and the people probably included you. :-) There did seem to be a bit of a phase for a couple of years before and after 2000 where companies decided that they had to get themselves an internet presence, and failed to comprehend that somebody else with the same name might have got to the namespace first. Because they were Company Limited, and thus of course the company name must have been reserved for them to use when they got around to it...