This is kind of crazy story, by the Gazette's Justin Mason: A guy in California who shares a name with the Princetown supervisor (as in, the Schenectady County town) ended up trolling the town's political circles -- via email. [Daily Gazette]
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Comments
as someone who ROUTINELY gets emails to my personal gmail account from someone looking for "Jim" or "John and Linda" and once from some guy trying to set up his LinkedIn account (5 tries.. FIVE) I can understand the "Other Mike's" frustration.
And emailing back and saying "I'm sorry, you have the wrong email address" doesn't actually work.. I once had a convo that went like this:
"Hi John and Linda.. here is our family newsletter"
Hi Dude.. sorry wrong email address.
"Hi John.. this is the email address you gave me.. remember?"
Hi Dude, this isn't John.. please stop sending me your family newletter, sports scores and church happenings
"John, I don't understand why you are acting like this".
DUDE, DON'T MAKE ME REPLY ALL AND SHOW YOUR FAMILY WHAT A DOPE YOU ARE.
So.. .. yeah.
... said Pirate Jeni on Oct 29, 2013 at 12:01 PM | link
I was just venting about this yesterday!! Remember when Gmail opened nine years ago, and you hurried to secure yourname@gmail.com - thinking it would be great to be THE REAL 'yourname' and not be stuck with an address with a bunch of random numbers or characters? Yeah, turns out it wasn't such a great idea since we live in a world where the average person can't remember their own email address, let alone figure out someone else's they are trying to contact.
Just like Pirate Jeni mentioned above, people don't seem to comprehend their mistake even after you reply nicely, and so I've also given in to replying with snarky comments when they don't get the idea. I was stuck on a never-ending group-vacation-planning email chain that would not go away until I started replying to all that the vacation had been cancelled.
One way that Princetown supervisor Mike Joyce might have avoided this - use a email address from your municipality's domain name for 'town business' and not just a Gmail account you setup...
... said Paul on Oct 29, 2013 at 2:18 PM | link
I had to Facebook stalk the guy who kept trying to open his linkedIn account with my email to get him to knock it off.. he was using it as his business email address EVERYWHERE.
Spend the $12 and get a domain for crying out loud.
... said Pirate Jeni on Oct 29, 2013 at 4:08 PM | link
I will agree with Pirate Jeni and Paul above, being polite rarely works and a Reply All sometimes straightens it all out. I've got a Hotmail account with my first initial & last name and I've gotten email for Dan, Danny, Don, Danica, and as of a couple weeks ago, Diego.
Somehow Diego managed to open a Facebook account with my email address and after 40 something Facebook notifications in 12 hours I ended up requesting a password reset from FB, logged into the account, and put in a bug report that Diego somehow used my email account without it being validated and if FB could return the FB page back to Diego I would appreciate it.
I could do lots of bad things with his FB account, but I have not gotten that annoyed yet.
... said Dennis on Nov 3, 2013 at 9:42 AM | link
Dennis - My email has also been used to create a Facebook account without validation. No idea how they were able to do this... but I was easily able to request a password reset like you did, and then delete the account. The only trouble was I first had to figure out how to set the preferred language to English!
... said Paul on Nov 3, 2013 at 12:01 PM | link
I ended up closing Diego's FB account, but I did have to switch the language from French-Canadian to English after I first reset the password. I also noted in the "other" reason for closing the account that Diego was able to create the account with an email address he didn't have control of.
... said Dennis on Nov 10, 2013 at 2:03 PM | link