Email confusions

It always amuses me when people don’t know their own email address. I mean, I can understand typos and forgetting some overly complicated string of characters but some people fundamentally seem to always get their own email address incorrect.

I’ve currently been involved with an issue with Redbox whereby one of their customers consistently enters MY email address as their own and I get their receipt (along with what they rented, when they rented, from where they rented it and the last 4 digits of their credit card number). This isn’t just a typo because they do it consistently. I’ve called Redbox (now 3 times) asking them to block my email address. At least the first two times the customer service representative probably just “unsubscribed me.” The third time I asked to speak to a manager and they allegedly marked it such that if the customer attempts to enter my email address at a location they will be presented with an error. It remains to be seen.

Curiously the manager suggested I hit the “unsubscribe” button on the email, to which I pointed out there was none (see picture below). Even more curiously, the manager said that sometimes people have the same email address. Huh? I can only hope that she meant something else to which I’m not sure. I tried to explain that email addresses were unique and someone else couldn’t have the same one though maybe a similar one. She glossed over my explanation. We’ll see if they actually blocked my email address.

Unfortunately this particular email address (I have nearly a dozen) is overly simplistic so I could easily see someone mistaking theirs with mine. This reminds me of Steve Wozniak’s early acquisition of the phone number 888-888-8888, which proved completely useless because of the number of inaccurate calls he received.

Apparently I’m not the only one who has this problem, as this ArsTechnical article points out.

 

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