Getting someone else's emails (same name/email address)!!!

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I'm after a bit of advice...

For a few months now i've been receiving someone else's emails, someone with the same email address (exactly the same) as me! These are not just circulars, etc but personal emails concerning his business in the USA, etc!

I cannot find a solution on the www and cannot seem to find a way to contact my webmail provider. Could anyone make a suggestion. I don't want to just sign up for a new address as the address is heavily connected with my work also!


TVM
 
Soldato
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Email yourself and ask him if he's getting your emails :p

EDIT: When you get your own email do not reply thinking it's him.
 
Soldato
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nobody has the same email address as you, they are giving out your email address incorrectly.
How can you say you have searched and not realised this? :confused:

I have it quite a lot because I have the .co.uk of my real name, and the .com and .co.uk of my handle, which are only 1 letter different. So people quite often send emails to me to my real name .com, fortunately they are quite nice about bouncing them back.
 
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I get this all the time as well, I have my initial and surname @gmail.com. Fed up of people registering on forums, sending me quotes for roofing in the USA or signing up to online games. I even had someone sign up to Facebook with my address and keep sending themselves password reminders, in the end I logged into their Facebook and put a message on their wall telling their friends to tell this guy he had the wrong address and to contact me.
 
Soldato
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A friend of mine was in the same situation. It got to the stage where he was being emailed things with the other person's home address on it. So he wrote to them explaining it all, and pointing out that he probably had enough information to steal their identity!
 
Soldato
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I get that on gmail,
I've [email protected] and I get email to some guy who has [email protected]
mostly monthly phone bills etc

That shouldn't actually be possible on gmail since those are the same email address based on how google handles the mail :confused:

You can test it yourself by sending an email to:

[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]

They ignore any '.' So every single email that guy would be getting sent would go directly to you
 
Soldato
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I get that on gmail,
I've [email protected] and I get email to some guy who has [email protected]
mostly monthly phone bills etc

Quite simply untrue.

https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=10313#

"Your address is similar but has more or fewer dots (.) or different capitalization."

Sometimes you may receive a message sent to an address that looks like yours but has a different number or arrangement of periods. While we know it might be unnerving if you think someone else's mail is being routed to your account, don't worry: both of these addresses are yours.

Gmail doesn't recognize dots as characters within usernames, you can add or remove the dots from a Gmail address without changing the actual destination address; they'll all go to your inbox, and only yours. In short:

[email protected] = [email protected]
[email protected] = [email protected]
[email protected] = [email protected]
All these addresses belong to the same person. You can see this if you try to sign in with your username, but adding or removing a dot from it. You'll still go to your account.

If you get mail that seems to be intended for someone else, it's likely that the sender entered the wrong address, just like if you've ever dialed a wrong phone number for someone. In these cases, we suggest contacting the original sender or website when possible to alert them to the mistake.

One last thing: Google Apps does recognize dots. If you'd like to have a dot in your username, please ask your domain1 administrator to add your preferred username as a nickname.

I'd check they aren't your bills...

EDIT:: Should point out that although the person doesn't have the email [email protected] he could have [email protected] and simply getting it totally wrong.
 
Last edited:
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Gmail is notorious for this, I guess it's something to do with gmail/google mail.

It's to do with it being a massively popular email service with so many users on it to make mistakes when giving out their email address. It's also to do with the email address itself, a common name with [email protected] or [email protected] will be much more likely to suffer from this problem compared to a 'random' email address.
 
Soldato
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I get this with my Yahoo mail account; I have [email protected] and every so often I get a spate of emails from a family of mostly rednecks in the US who think that the address belongs to a member of their family. (And they do appear to be rednecks complete with sending out pictures to family members of misc critters they've shot).

Latest spate though was when one of them booked some travel arrangements and I ended up with all their itinerary and e-tickets. So I contacted the travel agents and had that resent correctly. Then I got emails for them saying their trip may be affected by an incoming hurricane, so again I contacted the travel agents and had them sort it out ...

Have the same username on Hotmail and GMail and have had them all for many, many years but have only had this with GMail (so far)
 
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