The ones that concern me the most are the ones for people who not only share my name but also work in the same industry.  I see headhunters and worried clients emailing me thinking I’m the ruby developer as opposed to the python developer.  The danger of identity theft or professional reputation theft seems significant here.

I’ve often considered abandoning my commonly named gmail account in favour of a more obscure one but that would surely be as much work as the hours I spend every few months trying to unsubscribe from all these unintended lists. 

This is really another spam filtering problem, but much trickier than run of the mill spam.

BTW, Joan, James, Jennine, and Jennifer…if you happen to stumble onto this, you are not jrickman at gmail.com

I use the Gmail lab “Canned Responses” to help manage this. I have a few. One is a simple “You meant this for the wrong D. Harris”. Another is a “Some other D. Harris signed up, please remove me.

People are generally appreciative and responsive to these requests. Sometimes they’re humorously confused.

The most interesting thing was a whole dossier on someone’s proposed medical malpractice lawsuit.

The most pathetic ones were from several corporate  employment application websites (e.g. home depot and dollar general).