People Using My E-Mail Address

[TGO]

I was delighted when gmail first came out and a few months into its beta release, I finally snagged a much-coveted invite. For the first time in my life, I had a free web-based e-mail address that didn't have any numbers or characters or stupid words or series of letters in it. Just first initial, last name, exactly like I wanted it.

Here's the problem. First of all, the amount of spam I get is just incredible, because it's very easy for a spam bot to hit the correct combination of initial and name. Thankfully gmail zaps almost all of the spam into the spam folder and I don't have to look at it if I don't want to.

But what bothers me even more are the e-mails I get from websites that people sign up for, using my e-mail address. For instance, last week someone signed up for Reunion.com using my e-mail address. Well, guess what buddy, joke's on you. One, you have to activate your account from your e-mail, and two, I activated it (because they kept e-mailing me to get me to activate it), changed all of the settings so I wouldn't get more e-mails, and then deleted the account. Someone else used my e-mail for some lacrosse website, so I logged into their account, and changed the e-mail address AND the password. Good luck with that, jerk.

I understand not wanting to give out your e-mail address to these sites, but that's why you use the time honored nonsense e-mail account. Don't put in an e-mail someone is likely to have. That's just obnoxious.

[blueberryale77]

That sucks. I have a pretty unusual last name so that's never happened to me, but oddly enough when I finally accepted a gmail invitation after a couple years of refusing to hop on the bandwagon, my first initial and last name were already taken so I had to put a number at the end.

[jouster]

Pretty annoying, but basically nothing you can do about it. It's the price of a great e-mail address. Just keep deleting I guess. Someone did to my friend with their bank account - an almost moronically stupid thing to do.

My gmail account has a really unguessable name. I get hardly any spam and no sign-ups. But I have an address no one can remember....

[TGO]

Now someone used my e-mail to sign up for TurboTax and file their tax returns online. Uh, hello? All of the updates on your tax return are now coming to me. I know that the IRS rejected your return. Do you?

[Bosibus]

I wonder if it is the same person and is just typing in the wrong e-mail addy each time?

[TGO]

As far as I can tell, it has been different people. The lacrosse person was in Long Island, NY. The tax person is in Indiana. I think the reunion guy was in Wyoming or Montana or someplace like that.

The other ones have been sort of eh, whatever, this is annoying but I don't really care. This is someone not knowing that their tax return has been rejected, so I'm a little worried and trying to figure out what to do. I contacted TurboTax and their reply wasn't helpful, but I don't think they understood my question. I will have to write back to them.