Another me

I've been getting emails from a dating web site for the last few weeks. The emails said that people had viewed "my" profile on their web site. It was being flagged as spam by Hotmail. That's nothing new. I deleted them, as I do to all spam.

These seemed a little different.

As I've mentioned before, there are a number of people out on the internet who, for unknown reasons, think that my email address is their email address. It happens for Hotmail and Gmail. I get job offers from HR people, business emails, and forwarded humourous emails that people send to their friends.These aren't spam or phishing scams, these are legit emails. Sometimes I reply to them -- in particular the job offers or business emails -- letting them know they have the wrong person. Sometimes they reply back with apologies.

I began to wonder if these dating web site emails might be legit. Curiosity got the best of me today, and I visited the web site. Throwing caution to the wind, I clicked Forgot Password, entered "my" email address, and clicked Submit.

Minutes later, a message arrived in my Inbox with "my" login and password.

I logged in and there it was. Someone's profile with personal information that they added to the web site.

Now what?

I could have been malicious and changed their info or what they specified as the type of person they're looking for, but as much as it annoys me that people don't take care in entering their email address for things, I couldn't do that. And what would be the point? I'd be the one getting the emails anyway. ;)

Since they had a free account, I a delete account option and killed it. Goodbye me. I hope.

Was I wrong to close their account?

Things you may not know about Gmail (or GoogleMail)

Did you know that googlemail.com is the same as gmail.com?

Yep. If you have a Gmail or GoogleMail email address, you can use either domain name suffix in your email address. It would appear that at one time, Googlemail.com was a U.K. only domain for Gmail and then Google gave users the option to switch it to gmail.com.

Did you also know that Gmail (aka GoogleMail) ignores all periods in the email address prefix for Gmail/GoogleMail email addresses?

Yep. This means that "myemail@gmail.com", "my.email@gmail.com", and "m.y.e.m.a.i.l@gmail.com" are all the same addresses.

Every once in a while I get an email intended for another Scott Paterson, whom I believe lives somewhere in the U.K. It would appear that the other Scott Paterson is using the "scottpaterson AT googlemail.com" email address.

Unfortunately for that Scott, he'll never get any email intended for him because I happen to have the "scott.paterson AT gmail.com" email address and anything sent to him shows up in my inbox.

This makes me wonder if the other Scott ever tries to read his email, or if he just uses it to prevent receiving spam, because I can't see how he could ever log into Gmail to read the email. From what I read in the first link I posted above, he would have had to click an option to make the change from googlemail.com to gmail.com. If that’s the case, I’m kinda surprised that it was allowed since I’ve had the “scott.paterson AT gmail.com” for a long time.