Email weirdness: Prelude to a scam?

I certainly can't tell you whether it's a scam or not, but I can tell you it happens to me all the time. Other Linda Holmes does not know her email address (there are actually multiple Other Linda Holmeses with this problem), and I have thus gotten emails because she's trying to set up accounts with car insurers, book clubs, whatever. She just bought car insurance this weekend, for instance. I know what kind of car she drives. She has roadside assistance! There's another one who's a state legislator somewhere. Her accountant also sent me her full federal tax returns once. That was a fun one. I did write back to the accountant, like, "Um, hi. I don't know if this is her fault or your fault, but YO." As far as I know, this is a common result of somebody not knowing their own address, and it actually makes sense to me that you might get several at once if somebody just got themselves an address like firstname_lastname and thinks its firstname.lastname. Or something. I haven't ever been able to figure out how these could be scams, so I don't worry about them. To me, they're the email equivalent of wrong numbers.

This happens all the time. The explanation is that people are stupid and put the wrong email address in - either they think it's theirs but they get the username wrong (initial.surname instead of firstname.surname) or they get the domain name wrong (Hotmail instead of Gmail etc). So... a) Not a scam. b) Nothing you can do to fix it unfortunately.

Possibly they are using a period in their email address? Because Gmail http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail_interface#Addresses. So if you were used to using Firstname.Lastname@work and figured you would do that for Gmail, I could see that happening.

If this were a prelude to a scam I'd be in real trouble, as it happens to me on a daily basis. People have terrible memories and are terrible at typing. I think that's all this is.

My wife gets these CONSTANTLY. It is people that don't understand email addresses filling out the wrong one (or a made up one) when they create accounts. That you get the confirmation means the system is working in that your email is not linked to these accounts that don't belong to you. It's not a scam.

Another vote for fat-fingered typing or simple stupidity here. I get emails from and for a bunch of other people around the world who share my name all the time, and it's because a) Gmail thinks [email protected] and [email protected] are the same address and b) people don't know how to spell their friend/relative's name. I get the .co.au and .co.uk versions of my name, too. Like Linda, I get invites for job interviews, photos of new babies, and "Your package from Widgets, Inc. has just shipped." None of them are using my credit card details or real address, so I just filter to another folder and ignore. In a couple of cases, I've become email-friendly with people and I forward the message -- "Hey, looks like this is yours" -- and they are grateful.

There's been a bunch of questions about this in the past that may be helpful (they're showing up for me in related questions if you want to look at a few, http://ask.metafilter.com/128373/dealing-with-misdirected-email that I asked; I was getting someone signing up for all sorts of crazy scammy payday loan stuff with my email). Basically, this is harmless but annoying and you can probably ignore it. However, I would be very careful about clicking on any link that is actually in one of these emails, even google disavowal links -- at least check the headers and raw email carefully first. I think the most common explanation, for mine at least, is people putting spaces between a first and last name when entering an email (which then gets parsed into two email addresses). This is just going to keep getting worse for everyone over time I think, a sort of application of the http://mathworld.wolfram.com/DirichletsBoxPrinciple.html as the number of emails continues to increase and the space of plausible ones get fuller and fuller.

Other S. MyLastNames are constantly applying for college information with my email address, and recently gave my email address in relation to a visa application, so I got a scan of her passport, with all sorts of identifying information. Also a picture of her which comfortingly confirmed for me that it's not just me, everyone's passport photos are deeply unflattering. Which is to say that yeah, this happens a lot. I wouldn't worry about it. Generally, ignore. If you start getting a lot of email from the same site, you may want to set up some sort of straight-to-trash filtering. If you are feeling particularly nice or it is particularly important, you may wish to try to contact the Other You if you have enough information, or the company if not, to straighten it out. I usually ignore but did contact Passport Girl because that seemed like a pretty important thing to have screwed up, and her application gave me all the necessary information.

I have a datapoint that isn't related to fat-fingers or common names. My real name is relatively uncommon, and my email domain is one that I own and there's only one email address on it, mine. After signing up for a sketchy e-book website, I suddenly got a variety of confirmation emails -- "Confirm your Apple Store account" and "Confirm your Steam Account" and so forth -- my interpretation is that an automated spammer/hacker system somewhere was trying those places to see if I had an account there, and if not create an account in hopes that dumb me would click the confirmation email. I deleted them and ignored it and it eventually went away.