I receive misdirected emails with a bizarrely high frequency. About once a week, I receive an email at my old GMail address, addressed to someone unknown to me hundreds or even thousands of miles away.
There’s not much mystery to it. I was an early adopter of GMail, and grabbed a relatively common first-initial–middle-initial–surname username. Once GMail went out of beta, a bunch of people got addresses similar to mine. And from time to time they type their email address into a form and forget to add the digits or whatever is tacked on after the surname in their address, and next thing you know I’m getting a promo email from a yoga studio in Hamilton, Ontario. Or I’m getting invited to a golfing weekend in Florida or whatever.
They come from all over. Not just the unsurprising places in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, or USA. I get emails from Chile and Mexico too. I can speak Spanish, so that’s helpful in those instances.
I try to write a note to everyone, but honestly it’s been years of this, so I started semiautomating the process to make it interesting. If you’re technically savvy, you can check out the code here, although it’s not very exciting. It just kind of gets the job done.