Calling all my Techie Friends

[schadenfreude]

An unusual problem has arisen and I don't quite know how to deal with it.

On Tuesday, 06/21, I began receiving email for a Catherine Connelly at my gmail address. They are legitimate correspondence, not spam. Tuesday, I received her lab results from a physician's office, and today, I received a car rental reservation confirmation from National Rental.

Since I attempt to be responsible when/if a situation calls for it, I hit reply, stated my identity and that I did not know the intended recipient.

Now, here is the part that makes no sense. My gmail address has been my gmail address since May 2006, because there are messages with that date stamp in the archive.

How did this Catherine Connelly register for a gmail account with MY address?

I checked the knowledge base at GMail and even posted a query at their support forum, but no none has replied yet.

GMail doesn't have a "contact us" address or telephone number.

Another thing niggling at me: Is this Catherine Connelly receiving my email?

*weary sigh*

Please, give me something else stupid to worry about - I have nothing better to do!

Comments

[afuna]

The most likely case is that this Catherine Connelly has a similar email address to yours, and misremembered or misspelled her actual email address and believes that your email address is the one that she has.

So maybe she has (for example, not your real email address etc) schadenfreuder@gmail instead of schadenfreude@gmail, but is giving out the latter.

This would not let her see any of your emails, and would only let you see emails for her from people who she has mistakenly given a wrong email to.

Good luck; I hope that you can get her to realize she needs to use her actual own email!

[schadenfreude]

Thank you very much for responding - I know you're on holiday and I appreciate you taking the time.

After I thought about it a little longer, I realized GMail wouldn't allow two accounts with the same user name. I've been responding to each email I receive, to notify them they've sent it to the wrong address. If I'm lucky, she'll finally figure it out!

[afuna]

(Belatedly) Hey I'm glad I could help, and gladder that you worked it out! Hope that she did eventually figure it out before it became too much of a pain!