[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.

[catoc]

Law firms that send very sensitive legal documents over email… #sigh

I’d switch firms immediately if that’s their level of opsec awareness

[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.

[bakje]

Couldn't you reset the password since you have access to the email address?

[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.

[bonzini]

I have [e-mail] (we use it for bills, children activities, and other family stuff where you can't register more than one email address).

Neither of our names can be confused with a last name and yet I had multiple people writing to it incorrectly, including: as the email attached to a Diners credit card (I called Diners and they asked me what's the right one and "if I don't know the right one how do I know that it's wrong"), as the email for a school 400 km from home (another family must have had the same idea), once for some lawyer stuff (I then learnt that about 100 people in Italy do have my wife's name as a very uncommon last name), and lately as the recovery email for another Google account.

[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

[fn-mote]

Recently learned, to my surprise, that other major providers have not followed Google’s lead on this, so there are plenty of places dont.scam..me@ is a valid email (social engineering or typosquatting).