How do I go about contacting someone who has apparently confused my email address with her own?

I've had a similar problem, having snagged [email protected] in the early days of the service. Now I get email intended for every other firstname lastname in the world. What I've done is this: I have a canned response of "You have the wrong email for the person you are trying to reach. Their address is probably similar, but different than mine. Please contact them and get their correct address." This usually clears things up. If it's a subscription or bank email or something like that, I mark it as spam or try to unsubscribe. If there are multiple people copied on the email, I reply-all with the above message. If it continues, I mark it as spam. All it takes is one person to mis-key an email address and it propagates from there. It's probably not the person who shares a similar address as you. It's most likely their contacts making an assumption about the person's address. You just have to be ruthless about replying, reply-all-ing, and marking as spam. It eventually slows down or stops.

http://ask.metafilter.com/165951/Nacho-email-address. If it bothers you, try waiting for a family member or work colleague to email you, reply to them, and see if you can get her contact info to clear it up.

I have to chime in as one of the misanthropes on the other side of the fence. I'm a gmail user who chose firstinitialmiddleinitiallastname@gmail way back when. Then, 3 years later, I realized that was a bad idea because my middle initial is L and my last name starts with B, so people are always always skipping over the middle initial when they transcribe and sending my emails to firstinitiallastname@gmail. He tracked me down through a cc in one of the email chains and told me and I'm so grateful! It happens all the time with all kinds of personal stuff, even my bank. Now I use a domain email that forwards to the old email account, but with the gmail alias in the sending header, it still happens. Just because of a dumb choice I made in 2004. He's a very nice man and never complains. I'm very grateful for this internet stranger who does right by me even though he doesn't have to. I sent him an Amazon gift card at christmas and I'm going to keep doing whatever I can to thank him.

Email the car dealership back and say "if you have any other way of contacting this person, PLEASE let her know this is not her email address". I've had loads of people doing this with my Gmail address - some repeatedly. Some I was able to contact directly. Others I just persistently wrote back to anything that didn't seem machine-generated. One of them got a job refusal email. I wrote back saying "sorry, I know this will be awkward cuz you don't want her to work for you, but please give her a call and at the same time tell her she's giving out my email address." And ACTUALLY, it stopped after that. Someone else ordered some books at B&N. I sent her a postcard, since I had her physical address (incidentally, she never thanked me. Pfft).

There were lots of good ideas here. I spent some time replying to emails, telling the would-be sender that they weren't looking for me. Understandably, they didn't want to share a full name, and they didn't know the email address. Things like automated mail, or stuff sent through flickr and the like just had to get dumped. Eventually I got a first name in an email, and it wasn't a common name. Since my surname isn't too common, I took a gamble, and forwarded the email to [email protected] and that worked. Hopefully, she'll be able to take the next step and send a note to the people who do this most often. In the meantime, I'm happy to forward mail when I get it, now that I know where to send it. But I'm sure that, like me, she'd prefer to get her email directly, rather than having it rerouted through a stranger.

I had this going on for over a year and just recently was able to resolve it. Finally I got some emails for this other person which included a postal address so I sent her a letter saying that my email address was blah and that she seemed to be listing it as her address somewhere. She replied to me by email and explained how the mix-up had started and that she was so glad to figure out what had gone wrong, and since then I haven't gotten a single email intended for her. Yippee!

Yea, I had exactly this problem recently; a few months ago I began getting emails from an overseas university to one of my email addresses. At first I thought they might be a scam but after a while it became obvious it was genuine as they were tutors mailing him about class options, library withdrawal requests etc. Eventually there was a email replying to this student where the original email header details were quoted, it turns out that the student's email was the same as mine but (presumably because I'd got the address he wanted beforehand) he'd simply removed all the vowels from the same address - so if my mail was 'timpollard@email' his was actually 'tmpllrd@email' but for some reason he'd put the full address (mine) as the 'reply to' name, which is why I was getting it all. I mailed him but got no reply and after the university sent another I mailed them explaining the issue and cc'ed him in. Since then, nothing!

Since I didn't see anyone else say it, my guess is they are writing or typing their email correctly as firstinitiallastnaim@gmail, and people are helpfully correcting it to firstinitiallastname@gmail.* Possibly more likely, they are giving it over the phone and not clarifying an odd spelling of a common name. Not knowing your shared last name, I don't know how plausible that is. *Or your other has sloppy handwriting, and it's getting transcribed faithfully as far as the transcribers can tell.

Anecdote, delete away if you must, mods, but I get this all the time from a bank/credit union, and when I wrote to them to say "you are sending me someone else's bank statements" they replied "Are you sure? Because we double-checked the email address and it's what you gave us. Are you sure you're not the Ambrose Chapel located in South Carolina?". For god's sake. Someone's bank.