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September 15, 2018 08:34 pm

Slashdot Asks: Have You Ever Gotten Someone Else's Email?

Wave723 shares an article from IEEE's Spectrum:I was scrolling through emails on my phone one recent morning when a strange message appeared among the usual mix of advertisements and morning newsletters. It was a confirmation for an upcoming doctor's appointment in New York City, but came from an address I'd never seen before. And at the top, there was a friendly note: "I guess this is for you :)" The note, I would later learn, was written by a Norwegian named Andre Nordum whose email address is just a few letters different from my own... he'd Googled my name to try to track down my personal email address and forward the message to me. All day, I thought about Andre's act of digital kindness and the heartwarming fact that a stranger had spent time and effort trying to send me a bit of important information. I also felt a twinge of guilt: I'd received emails in the past -- from car dealerships and daycares -- that were clearly meant for other people, and I'd never forwarded any of them along. The 33-year-old Norwegian banker later joked that he did it because "I did not want to get emails about your dermatology history for the foreseeable future." But another Norwegian has been returning mis-directed emails for over a decade with mundane stories about the family dog and games of pickleball -- meant for another E. Nordrum. "It's a little bit like sitting on the bus or overhearing somebody in the restaurant or something," he says, admitting that when they finally stopped coming, "I was a little bit sad, actually." In 2017 the other E. Nordrum flew from America to Norway on a vacation, finally meeting the man who'd been returning all his mis-addressed emails -- and they ended up talking for hours. The article calls it a reminder "of how downright pleasant it can sometimes be to interact with strangers on the Internet." But it also asks an interesting question: "Do these email mix-ups happen to everyone? " I know I'm still getting emails about a storage space somebody opened 1300 miles away. And Slashdot reader antdude writes, "A few days ago, I got an USC.edu's doctor email (CCed with a few other people) about an upcoming surgery for a transplant. I was like huh?" How about the rest of Slashdot's readers. Have you ever gotten someone else's email?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/iyj3S0hfZhs/slashdot-asks-have-you-ever-gotten-someone-elses-email

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