Return To Sender

It seems like TerminalDigit is turning into the place where all I do is rant about my inbox, but I guess having a theme for your blog is good . . . so here’s the latest issue:

I have a relatively common name. I’m not exactly John Smith, but . . . well let’s just say that there were three other kids in my high school (population: 2000ish) with the same name as me (one in the same year). Anyway, you can probably guess where this is going . . . I get their e-mail. You wouldn’t believe how many idiots there are who think they can contact whoever they want by entering [firstname].[lastname]@gmail.com in the To: field and firing away. Of course, these are “legitimate” e-mails, so the GMail spam filter’s usual approach is useless here. It’s not just a matter of annoyance either—I get information that I really shouldn’t have, information that a malicious person could use to wreak havoc with work or school schedules, relationships, etc. Of course I wouldn’t do that because that punishes the other “me,” who really isn’t the source of the problem—it’s the moron who blindly sent the e-mail.

After years of notifying the sender and just deleting the stuff, I’ve seen no slowdown in the influx of these mistargeted messages. In fact, lately, they seem to be arriving even more frequently! Well I am tired. So I’m going to start publishing the names and e-mail addresses of all these moronic senders, and whoever—human or bot—that comes across this list is free to do as they wish with the information. Is this going to solve my problem? Not a chance. Is this at least going to make life a little more difficult for those who are the source of the problem? I’m going to pretend the answer is yes.

Let’s begin:

Special Circle of Hell

This section is reserved for all the people with my name who apparently don’t know their own e-mail address. Their idiocy is on a whole different level, so I’m actually going to post their entire messages.

  • Idiot #1 gave his bank the wrong e-mail address. No, this isn’t a phish. Click here for the e-mail (which includes last 4 digits of his credit card number). Apparently Bank of America is happy to waste its time implementing broken security features like SiteKey, but it doesn’t require you to verify that you actually own the e-mail address that you specify. Way to go!
    Update: Looks like his credit limit just got bumped to $5,000!
  • Idiot #2 e-mailed “himself” some code that appears to control some sort of gizmo (I didn’t care enough to read through it). Check out the (mostly blank) e-mail and zipped code.
  • Idiot #3 forwarded “himself” a copy of his paycheck stub. Apparently he makes 230,000 unspecified monetary units per year. Not enough to buy a brain, unfortunately. Here’s the e-mail which contains one of those bogus disclaimers, and here’s the payslip.
  • Idiot #4 gave his car insurance company the wrong e-mail address, and they proceeded to send “him” this e-mail (again with a bogus disclaimer), with his ID cards attached.

Details

Calendar Icon 23 Jul 2007
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