Email Addresses

<rant mode on>

Email Addresses:  I mean, how hard are they exactly?  I ask because I regularly get emails into one of my Gmail accounts for other Emma J Taylor’s.  Yes, there are others out there with the same name, but it seems that they are not capable of remembering their email address.

For example, I have had the following in my name…

  • Gym membership which gave me the full access to a UK wide gym, who emailed the person concerned her account details.  She had sadly entered my email address not her’s.  This meant that I now had full access to her account online.  The problem was that she didn’t because their system assigned her a password which they emailed to ‘her’ or rather me via my email address.  So I logged in as her to ascertain if I could help her or at the very least cancel the account and remove my email address from their system.  What I got was her full name, address and mobile phone number.  The company had also emailed me her bank details for me to confirm as valid for her direct debit!
  • Can I please pay my daughter’s ballet lessons please otherwise they will stop her attending the next lesson! Err, no I won’t because I don’t have a daughter!  Perhaps you could try an alternative method for pestering the parents for payment please AND remove my email address off your system?
  • An American Lady who is setting up a blog about something in New York… everything has been registered to my email address which when there is a link to click on to confirm, activate and set-up the password is a slight problem.  So I now have all the details.  I have activated the account after trying unsuccessfully to get it deregistered in the hope that I could delete everything and clear the system of my email address.  She has even opened a support request to which I have responded politely pointing out that she needs to set-up the system with her email address not mine.  I have even edited the blog page saying to contact me and I will provide her with the password so that she can go in and change things to her email address…. all I got was another password reset link sent to my email address.  So I added another post, pointing out very politely, that when you use the wrong email address to set everything up, trying to reset the password which is sent as a link to that wrong email address, won’t work…  We are still waiting.  I will go in on Saturday and delete the whole b****y thing and she can lose the domain name she has paid for along with the web hosting etc.  She’s had nearly a month to deal with it all.
  • I’ve had a firm on lawyers in Australia (Queensland) contact me about purchasing land…  this one has been going on for years.  They were purchasing hundreds of thousands of hectares of land from what I can gather but there were some difficulties.  I have many many times now contacted them and pointed out that they really need to try an alternative email address, remove mine from their systems and contact Emma & Stewart Taylor a different way.  This started many years before we even considered moving to Australia.
  • I’ve had bills for the above people, overdue on mobile phone bills, electricity, car payments….  Their mobile phone is going to be cut off if they don’t pay and in Australia, most things are now totally electronic, so they won’t actually know this!  Their electricity is the same and as for the 4×4 or is it a Yute?  I cant remember now, but they are heading towards repossession… At least the home address is correct even if the email address isn’t!

The latest, within the last week, for the above Emma & Stewart Taylor, is that they still owe over AUD $11,000 for some steerers (cattle for those not knowing) they purchased a while back and payment was due in full at the end of last year…

  • Lottoland – that one was interesting because I really did not want my email address on their systems and it took several months of polite and then less polite emails to their helpdesk to get the account unregistered.  Then the person who registered it in the first place complained, so it was re-instated but still in my email address!  I had to escalate the call several times through various levels of supervisors to get someone who spoke good enough English to understand that an incorrect email address had been used to create the account and I was not happy about it.  It was finally sorted out and I do periodically try to log back in, or do a password reset (best option) on my email address which now comes back as account not known!

What else?
Well there have been so many it has become hard to remember them all…

  • One final one, it came in at Christmas on 24th December and whoever you are, thank you, but it is utterly useless to me.  CAD $35 of Starbuck’s vouchers from some people called Jami and Jess.

Jami and Jess wanted to make your day so they’ve sent you a C$35.00 Starbucks Card eGift to spend on your favorite drink.

There are exceptionally few Starbucks in Australia, rather like Costa Coffee, they simply failed to start chains here because Australia decided they already had more than enough coffee shops!  So if there are any readers in Canada (and I think there is one!) and you want to contact me and ‘claim’ it please feel free.  The relevant people have already ‘lost’ the money.  I have tried unsuccessfully to return it to them, so rather than the money sit and earn profit for Starbucks (there are currently 10 Starbucks in Sydney, 5 in Melbourne and 8 in Brisbane – that’s it and somehow I suspect they won’t take it in Canadian Dollars!) if you would like it, please feel free to have several coffees on me.

So, how has all of this happened?  Well I had a friend at a work place who got a Gmail beta email account back when Gmail was completely unheard of and totally new.  I was offered one of those initial 100 invites each account holder got which I accepted and whilst the system was still beta, I signed up.  I couldn’t use Emma or EmmaTaylor, so I went with EmmaJTaylor instead.  I am so very glad now that EmmaTaylor had already been taken!  I can not for the life of me think of the hassle that that poor person has had/is getting.  Once Gmail took off, they needed more email addresses and a better way of defining what you could and could not have, so names were no longer permitted and you needed to add numbers.  This was not backdated, so the initial users were still able to use their original choices and for some reason the rest of the population called Emma J Taylor seem unable to remember that they have numbers after their name for their email addresses!  OK in one case it was a data entry error at the other end rather than at the user end, but the amount of confidential information and data that finds its way to me has been unbelievable.

</rant mode over>