You’ve taken over my inbox!
When Google introduced Gmail back in 2004, I happily snagged an e-mail address with my actual name. A few months later, I noticed someone named “Danny Wong” started sending messages to that address, and his friends started corresponding with him at that address.
I have no idea why he started using my e-mail address. I guess he thinks he signed up for that specific username? I have several e-mails in the inbox indicating someone tried to change the password unsuccessfully.
After three years worth of messages not intended for me, what I can see is, this guy:
- Has some connection to Cal Poly Pomona. Maybe he went there? He joined their Vietnamese student association.
- Trades stocks in Singapore at least several times a week.
- Lives in the Toronto area.
- Needs to work on his grammar.
- Likes astrology and Marvel comics.
- Travels often to Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore.
- Has friends that e-mail jokes every so often. And friends that want him to join a zillion different social networks. (But who doesn’t have friends like that?)
- Applies to a lot of jobs.
It’s kind of weird. Since his real e-mail address has been carbon copied on various messages, I guess I could have e-mailed him and told him to quit it right in the beginning. But when I originally signed up for the Gmail account, I didn’t really *need* yet another e-mail address. (I just figured I might as well take the username just to have it, in case I wanted to use it in the future.) So I didn’t check it frequently. And now, three years later, it seems kind of pointless to try to do anything about it.
In a way it feels like someone’s invading my personal space. But on the other hand, with e-mails that aren’t intended for me, I feel like I’m invading his space!
I guess when you have a name (Dan/Danny/Daniel Wong/Wang) as common as mine, people can get confused. Not sure how else to explain why this happened.
In fact, just doing a quick Google search with my name, I see:
There’s a photographer, a designer, a game critic, a chef, an author, a real estate agent, a stunt man, a sports commentator, a mobile guru, a Web administrator, a professor – and most impressively, a student leader/protester who was No. 1 on the Chinese government’s “Most Wanted List” as a result of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Wow! And that was with me spending only a few minutes on the search engine!
There are probably a ton of other people with some form of my name. At the very least, I beat them to the punch and snagged the danwong.com domain name early on. Not that I’ve ever done anything with it, except for this semi-pointless blog.
About this entry
You’re currently reading “You’ve taken over my inbox!,” an entry on Dan Wong
- Published:
- 07.13.07 / 2pm
- Category:
- Technology
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