Re: This has happened to me for years
Yeah, I have a guy with the same name in Ireland who's somehow convinced that he has a variation of my email address.
One year I managed to get a postal address off a plane ticket he bought and sent him a letter. He was very good for a while, and wrote a nice letter back and closed a bunch of accounts (including PayPal - I could have been very naughty and "confirmed" his account and then waited for him to add a credit card, but I'm far too honest). But then either he or another person in Ireland with the same name started doing it again about six months later.
I now just put them in spam folders. Fact is, it's more tricky to convince me anyway as I have a domain that forwards to various things (one destination is a GMail that I can access on the go), but for which I use unique prefixes for each service. It's quite obvious and takes seconds to know if an email was sent to the actual prefix I signed up with, to some made-up prefix at my domain, or direct to the GMail account. Pretty much anything direct to the account is spam (I've never advertised that address whatsoever).
I always wondered what the point of the dot-address stuff was on GMail as I could only think of ways for it to go wrong. On a side-note, does anyone remember the Apache mod_spell module, that would try to correct mis-spelled page names? That always seemed the same to me... surely it just lets a ton of mis-spelled links propagate all over the web rather than actually fix the problem.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
