I hate that I have to play this game and constantly wonder, but, is this someone else's COVID brain fog, or something else going on here? Your guess is as good as mine.
Way back two whole years ago, one morning I started getting e-mails that I at first thought were fishing attempts, but they were all coming from businesses in the same town in Texas. I started reading them a little more carefully and realized that someone was shopping around some pretty important business, but for some reason was using my address. One of them came with his phone number, so I texted the person and explained I was getting a bunch of their, seemingly important, e-mail.
At first the guy goes "No, that's my e-mail address." So I try and explain that, no, they're all in my inbox and I've used this e-mail address for 20 years. A few minutes later he replies with a "OH CRAP! There's an underscore in my e-mail. That IS your e-mail address!"
Case settled, right? No.
I continued to get his e-mail regularly. For a while I forwarded every one of them onto him like some mail service. After a while I realized he wasn't catching on. They just kept coming. Stuff he would probably really want. His car dealer account. His PayPal info. His car registration. His new mortgage paperwork that needed to be signed.
Obviously, this guy should be really glad that I'm a nice person. I have received, at one point or another, literally every piece of personal info about him. I've forwarded on the really important stuff and "forgotten" to, and deleted, a bunch of his concert and movie tickets, etc. and left him logged out of a bunch of accounts in the hope that he'd eventually wrap his head around it all and stop. I'm not his secretary, and each time I've sent something to him I've explained *directly to him* that he's using MY e-mail address again. When I e-mail or text him he doesn't seem to have any problem understanding what I'm saying.
This week I've received some really important legal stuff, I realized he's now given a lawyer my e-mail address, and I sent them to him again. But I've finally decided I'm done. I'm abandoning the e-mail address I've used for 22 years because I don't want to feel responsible for some brain addled dude's important info any longer, and I really don't want to sort through my e-mail every day trying to decide if it's for me or him.
If anyone's wondering why unemployment's low but productivity's down, crap like this is why. There's a lot of people out there who really don't seem to be functioning at a particularly high level.
@paper_clip @BE It's got to be the underscore. I accidentally learned years ago that at least with Gmail, a dot in the userid is ignored. So firstlast@gmail.com works the same as first.last@gmail.com.
@BE
The other thing that can be a factor in this type of situation is auto-complete. Lots of email services will helpfully auto-suggest any address that ever appears in your Sent or Received mail.
To fix it, this guy would have to manually delete every single message he's sent or received with your address anywhere in it.
Most people REALLY don't want to believe that's what it takes ...but that is what it takes to stop seeing 'looks right' and hitting tab, and sending the wrong addy AGAIN.
@BE WOW, that is wild. I totally understand abandoning your email, and at the same time, if I had to do that, I would be SO MAD!!! You're so right, that guy is VERY LUCKY you are a good person and didn't steal his identity!
@BE oh no, you have a Frank with dementia! I’ve got a Boomer named Frank who periodically uses my email as his own - a collision of my preferred nickname and his first-letter-last-name. He’s settled down this decade, but he’s not dead yet - he rented a car using my email a couple years ago.
I don’t know what Frank’s actual email address is, but when he was applying for home refis all the time in the late twenty-teens, I sent him a postcard, to his refi address, asking him to please stop using my address. 😂
Damn, I’d be all torn up if that started happening to me and Frank. I wish your doppelgänger good luck and good health 🥺
@BE I feel some of this has to do with the underscore. It's an unusual character that might lost when verbally stating the email address (for the someone to type in, who may not realize it's a significant character) or a written form (again, where someone has to type it in).
You had also communicated with him and shown that you will forward his mail (so you're a nice guy), which reduces his incentive to deal with the problem in anything other than a cursory way.