Weirdy things are happening with my Gmail account. Every so often, I get seemingly random emails. They don’t appear to be spam, but email sent by real people to other real people. It seems that they have been given my gmail address as a contact, OR they have decided that my gmail address must be for the person they think they are trying to contact.

For example, emails I have received have included an invitation from a PR outfit to interview someone. They thought I was a journalist (I was cc’ed in with someone else too). I also got someone explaining that they were resigning and they wanted to tell me in person (though I suspect that if they didn’t know their supervisor’s email address, they probably didn’t have much time to go anyway).

The latest one has been from Sony Online Entertainment confirming my subscription for DC Universe. I’ve contacted SOE because someone has likely cocked up their email address entry. To check that is wasn’t phishing, I went to the SOE website and requested a password reset for the username in the email. It came to me, which means that someone has cocked up their email address and I’m going to get their SOE junk. Anyway, I’m hoping their accounts department can straighten out the cock up.

Question is - has this kind of thing happened to anyone else with a Gmail account?

Yes, I got copied into an email from a father and son who were looking at marketing a war film to someone. Apparently I was a friend who had some thoughts. It didn't seem like spam because there was the whole conversation below in various replies...

Yes - the emails I have been getting appear to be based on existing relationships rather than just random happenstance. It’s curious because you would expect people to know the email addresses of people that they correspond with frequently.

I've had people email me thinking I'm family and sending me their baby pictures. Annoying thing was their mail filter gone done block my replies lol. Had someone else insist their email address was something which just wasn't possible - it had spaces in the domain name. You'd think people might at least get their own address right?

Gmail does have one peculiarity in that it ignores dots and has multiple domains.

For example, the following are all the same address:

billy.bob@gmail.com
bill.y.bob@gmail.com
billybob@googlemail.com

It's easy to see how strange mistakes could happen.

Yes - and I didn’t know this until recently. I always thought the dot was all part of it, and make the address unique.

What an odd way of doing things!
I can understand example.mail@gmail.com being the same as example.mail@googlemail.com...
But examplemail@gmail.com and example.mail@gmail.com should be different....

More today. One asking to a video conference - they had mistyped the email address and had got my name instead of the person they were trying to contact. The other was, I guess, some kind of IT outfit wanting credit on chips.

I just sent them both emails telling that I wasn't the person they think I am and they should be more careful with the Send button in the future.

Don't people just check what email address they are using? One day, I'll be getting something confidential.

You can also do things like billy.bob+spam@gmail.com, and anything after the plus is ignored but can be detected for filtering stuff. So I do exactly that and any marginally suspicious sites are given an address that's put in a "Suspected Spam" filter initially.