[bertil]

A friend of mine has a relatively common first name and last name, and she regularly gets mail that is clearly not meant for her. She started a Facebook group for homonyms to help her route mail, and it now have a hundred members and have helped people get important documents.

At some point, they even organized an impersonation because someone needed to retrieve an official document and couldn’t be there in person. Another member nearby offered to go and get it. “Won’t you need my ID for that? — Oh, I have one with just the right name…”

[kace91]

My name isn’t super known, but it happened to be the same as that of a very big fish in the financial institution I worked for.

Thankfully these people were working mostly through physical meetings and calls, so no sensitive info was leaked, but I did get calendar invites to discuss the future of entire countries as an engineering intern.

I used the name a couple times to set up our internal meetings in the fancier upper floors, so we could have whiteboard discussions over a fancy hardwoods table. No one questioned the name appearing in the entrance display as the current user.

[georgeburdell]

Not identical, but I once shared most of the first name as well as my last name with a VP of research at the company I worked for, and we were in the same technical field. My (much less impressive) publication record got confused with his frequently and I always wondered if it gave me a career boost.

[burningChrome]

>> My name isn’t super known, but it happened to be the same as that of a very big fish in the financial institution I worked for.

Same thing happened to me. My name in outlook was the right under a high up VP. Outlook auto correct would bring my name up at the top of the list so people would just hit enter and write their email.

Same thing, I was getting some emails I clearly should not have been viewing, with budgetary spreadsheets and names of people who were being considered for layoffs.

One of them I sent back to the VP and diplomatically explained the mixup. I didn't get any emails for a few months and wondered how they fixed the situation. I guess they gave the VP and underscore in his name instead of the normal [e-mail] so now when I typed in my name, his came up first.

[deanishe]

We had a board member who frequently emailed confidential documents to a security guard with the same name as another director.

It was his iPad's fault, apparently.

[antidamage]

My deadname was not only owned by some other people in my industry, it was also used by someone else born in the same hospital, same ward on the same day, on the same morning as me. That was endlessly irritating.

Glad to see that after five years post abandoning it my contribution to the name is basically gone from the internet now.

[bitwize]

Nice to meet you, Jeff Lebowski.

[zukzuk]

I have a relatively rare name — I’ve actually never met anyone with my last name, never mind someone with my full name — and this happens to me regularly. Last week I got a job rejection from New Zealand post, for a while I was getting someone’s pay stub notifications from the US, etc.

I suspect it’s because I was the first to register the [e-mail] address for my name. I guess it’s a bit like owning a simple noun .com domain.

[donohoe]

I use my lastname [at] gmail (same as my HN username). Over the years, I’ve received all sorts of misdirected messages: medical, financial, support, even real estate documents. When it seems important, I do my best to contact the sender and let them know.

What I’ve learned is that “no-reply” email addresses can cause real harm in situations where it’s critical to reach an actual person.

[cootsnuck]

Yea I own [e-mail] for my name too and I get emails for who I think is the same person fairly often. Like job stuff, professional education emails, etc. I used to reply to them saying wrong person but have given up...the guy must not care about not getting these emails...

My first name is very uncommon and my last name is very common.

[giancarlostoro]

I have met someone with my last name, if its not hyphenated, which mine is. My name is as unique as it gets with hyphenating. I never use my hyphenated name anywhere other than 100% legal stuff.

[Grazester]

My address is the same. Someone with my name thinks their email address is [e-mail]

Its annoying especially since we have the same bank and they are not very good at paying their credit card on time. I therefore get their bank emails. Initially It will always have me confused as weight wait. I don't have any balance on my credit card. Was this fraud?

[mrec]

I'm in exactly the same situation - very rare last name, [e-mail] address, wrong mail from all over including NZ.

[notahacker]

I have a sufficiently uncommon last name to be able to figure out which branch of the family the misdirected emails are meant for. Was quite nice getting updates from the chip shop we used to get fish and chips from when we went to visit grandma, intended for someone who afaik I never met.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I had an Australian criminal defense attorney with my name, register the .au version of my personal domain.

I used to get very sensitive documents sent to me. A lot of juvenile cases. I suspect people could have gone to jail for sharing it.

It's really on the sender, to make sure, but it's still a nasty situation.

It eventually stopped. I think they ended up registering a different domain name. I used to diligently respond, when sent erroneous documents, but never got a reply. I destroyed them, but there's no telling where other copies might have gone.

[jacquesm]

> At some point, they even organized an impersonation because someone needed to retrieve an official document and couldn’t be there in person. Another member nearby offered to go and get it. “Won’t you need my ID for that? — Oh, I have one with just the right name…”

That's a felony in many places.

[dahart]

If it hypothetically was a crime, I wonder how often it would actually get prosecuted given someone used their real ID, showing the office failed to check anything other than a name known to have dupes, and/or given they had no intent to steal something and acted with knowledge and permission of the intended recipient, showing no malicious intent. I can imagine reasons those wouldn’t be considered a valid defense, but I guess it probably depends on what office & document & law we’re talking about.

[toast0]

Is it? An authorized agent picked up the document. Someone with matching ID picked up the document.

Where's the crime?

[bertil]

I think you are massively overestimating the legal follow-through of an administration with opening hours so tight and irational they would be scadalous at a lingerie show.

[kingkawn]

Shhh, snitch

[mywacaday]

I'm Irish and have a common [e-mail] At some point the head of a national hospital thought he had that address and wasn't using his official email for everything, I got several emails that should not have been for me and some were quiet sensitive, I always emailed back the sender to let them know and eventually I emailed his secretary as it kept happening. I've also received purchase order confirmations from Australia, building contracts from Canada, HR emails from a university to which I had to confirm I had deleted the mail as letting them know led to GDPR investigation

[baubino]

I’m in the midst of a similar situation. My firstinitial.lastname email keeps getting very sensitive legal documents from law firms handling the case of someone who does not seem to know what their actual email address is. I called the firm and told them they needed to have an in-person meeting with their client and get a correct email address from them. That seemed to help for a few months. But now I’m getting emails again from a different law firm.

[mcv]

There are several people with my name at the company I work for. I frequently get email meant for someone else.

Worst was at another company where a person with the same name has just left, so they gave me that email address. Turned out he was subscribed to several Confluence pages for which I now received updates. But I didn't get his Confluence account, so I couldn't unsubscribe from those updates.

[cogogo]

I have a canonical gmail address for what I thought was not such a common name pair. I get so much sensitive stuff. I used to email the sender but I have given up. One of them runs a business and the businesses that interact with his business just keep emailing me. Or stop for a couple of years, change personnel and start right back up.

[heffer]

Same here. My Google Account is something along the lines of [e-mail] (a common hispanic first name + birth year; I'm German).

It's unusable. I have received full blown mortgage applications from couples in Mexico (including paystubs, tax forms, credit ratings, phone bills, passports). Mostly, these days, it's transaction notifications for a guy in Nigeria and phone bills for people in South America.

[rkomorn]

My spouse suffers from this as well. It's bananas to me how many people use that email address clearly thinking it's theirs.

[MaxBarraclough]

> I'm Irish and have a common [e-mail]

At the risk of nitpicking, @gmail.com email addresses use a dots don't matter policy [0] so really you have a common [e-mail] and are free to add dots wherever you like.

[0] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150

[reactordev]

I did a similar thing during lockdown Covid era. Got online and rounded up everyone with the same name as me as we all decided not to tarnish the name, to build respect on the name, and each of us to excel in our fields. It was powerful. One’s a musician/DJ in buenos aries, the other a mechanical engineer for SpaceX, me - a software leader, another is a luthier making traditional folk instruments, and one is a writer across the pond in the EU.

A few years later Tina Fey did those commercials where she pulled in other Tina Feys and we all messaged the group like “Hey! They did it too!”. I’m sure many others did it. The world is so connected now that you should reach out and learn about your “alter-egos”.

Anyways, this reminded me of that and it’s nice to see other people have similar experiences being weird with, I guess themselves.

[linohh]

That is so incredibly smart. I have a very common gmail address (initial + last name) and literally hundreds of people use this mail address and I would love to resolve the countless issues I can witness from getting the mails alone, but I essentially have no chance at all.

[dietr1ch]

It's ridiculous that the US still runs on name matching when you could just have a public Id number (unlike the SSN that everyone needs to pretend it's secret).

[TheNewsIsHere]

We still have to pretend SSNs are private until both law and common practice change. I expect that to be “functionally never”. Maybe within our lifetimes. Maybe.

My SSN is out there several times over at this point, thanks to breaches at phone companies, insurance companies, CRAs, ISPs, and the rest. I stopped tracking breaches that included the kind of info you’d need to impersonate me, about six years ago. The list was long and it seemed to be a pointless exercise by then.

I also have a mixed credit file with all major CRAs because of more than one person with the same name I have, one of whom lived in the same area.

Even if I didn’t have freezes everywhere, over the phone KBAs stopped working years ago even with my SSN.

[cbsmith]

I have this problem badly enough I was interviewed for this article: https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/workplace/work-colleague-same-...

You wouldn't believe some of the things that have shown up in my inbox.

[sceptic123]

I have a relatively uncommon first name (for my age group) but a very common surname. The first person I met with the same first name as me was when I was about 13 — they also had the same surname.

[mysterydip]

I once worked at a company whose lawyer shared the same first and last name. Rarely I would get an email and then a "please don't read that, delete immediately" afterwards.

[mrgaro]

I used to have a very common name (before getting married and took my wife's last name). Imagine that I have firstname.lastname@gmail and somebody was genius to take firstname.lastnam@gmail.

I felt this was so stupid, that i quickly lost any willingness to try to relay the emails to their original owner, as the other person had zero interest to change their address to be harder to mistype.

[speckx]

I have a similar username on a "social media" site as the founder's username. I would get hateful personal messages, requests for favors, begging for money, etc., constantly. At first I would respond to correct people, but after years and years I stopped. I just disable notifications for that site and never read my mailbox, personal messages, etc. This has been going on for about 19 years now.

[abhiyerra]

I have [e-mail] as my alumni email address and I get a lot of interesting emails directed towards more important people…

[Yetino]

The other end of the spectrum has its own problems too. My first and last names are both quite rare — deliberately so, thanks to my parents. That means when someone, say a potential employer, googles my name, it’s reasonable for them to assume every result they see is about me. For a while, I actually liked that. It felt like having a unique identity online. Until one day I discovered someone else had created a YouTube channel under the exact same name. Presumably they happen to share this unusual combination legitimately — but the content on that channel wasn’t exactly what I’d want showing up when someone searches for me. I tried to “correct the record” by setting up my own channel, just to add some better signals. But since YouTube isn’t my thing, my videos barely register, and Google still insists on showing the other person’s channel first.

[fortran77]

My firstname / lastname isn’t common but if you google it you get a disbarred attorney with the same name. I’ve been asked on interviews about being disbarred; I know then that someone at the company is a sloppy “researcher”.

[eru]

I wonder if I'm accidentally doing that to someone.

My complete name is rare, but I share it with a journalist who's quite a bit older than me.

[s0rce]

I have a common first initial and last name and that's my gmail and I get more email for other people than myself