Fan mail

Multiple people with my name (homonyms) are convinced their email address is like mine without the dot, e.g., marcocecconi@ instead of marco.cecconi@.

For the Gmail mail servers, these two are aliases of each other. Every email sent to either address gets to my inbox. In particular, all mail coming to me via the dotless address is not addressed. Reading it is usually a waste of time, so I created a Gmail filter to deal with it. Gmail tags it, archives it, and sends an autoresponder kindly pointing out I'm not the person they are looking for.

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Over the years, I have collected hundreds of these emails. Very few people, about 1-2%, are so distracted or not-so-internet-savvy that they don't realize the answer is an automatic response, and they start a conversation.

Many of these conversations are funny, but sometimes they are "funny scary," and today, I noticed the best one so far.

I got a cease-and-desist-style nastygram from a Tamoil lawyer where they think I'm the lawyer of someone else. I can deduce them because they call me "dear colleague," in the classic passive-aggressive, wererabbit style of legalese conversation.

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I must assume that this lawyer is paid by the word written and not by the result achieved. Upon receiving Gmail's autoanswer, they decided to craft another nastygram saying they "integrally contest my content." Claiming their previous notice was valid. Whatever rocks your boat dude.

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Other unbelievable stuff I recently got.

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Banking data (I have not looked, but I assume complete bank account data), This guy is sending me automatically all of their scans. I have perhaps a dozen such emails.

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OnlyFans login details

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An important contract

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Clemence was distraught

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Many of these discounts by the world's worst pizza.

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A 250 euro invoice for wine

What is scary is that all of these (or where I can be reasonably sure) belong to different homonyms of mine! There is maybe a dozen other Marco Cecconi's leaking information.. to me.

So if you are one of them: please stop. Your email is like your house keys. It's reckless to give them to random people you don't know. Stop ordering at Domino.

Does anything happen to anyone else? Please share below!


Hi, I'm Marco Cecconi. I am the founder of Intelligent Hack, developer, hacker, blogger, conference lecturer. Bio: ex Stack Overflow core team, ex Toptal EM.

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