OK, I know I should be able to figure this out but my brain is not functioning properly right now (more coffee intake in progress). Here is a stupid problem I have with Gmail. As some of you may know, Gmail does not consider dots to be characters. For example, I have the address myname@gmail.com. If someone sends a message to my.name@gmail.com or my.na.me@gmail.com it shows up in my inbox. I was lucky enough to get in on Gmail in the early beta stages and secure firstinitiallastname@gmail.com. However what happens now is that people will give their address to websites or whatever as firstinitial.lastname@gmail.com or something similar and then I end up getting mail intended for them. I want to create a rule that only mail addressed directly to firstinitiallastname@gmail.com shows up in my inbox and everything else goes to my spam folder. I don’t use my gmail account much so I haven’t had to do this before. And I’ve been derpy this morning trying to figure it out. Any ideas?
I feel your pain - I (also) have surname@isp.co.uk and I get a ton of email for others.
I don’t believe you can create a filter for “anything except”. What you’d probably have to do is create a filter for each version as it gets used to mark it as spam.
I use mix-ups like these as an opportunty to troll the people who send email to me when it’s supposed to go elsewhere.
OOOOH. So THAT’S what’s happened! I kept getting email from someone in Arkansas, asking me to call them after Zumba, sending me updates to this that or the other thing, and I couldn’t get them to stop! I tried to get them to check the spelling of the address, and maybe they did since I haven’t gotten anything else from them.
That seems like a serious failure on Gmail’s part. 
I dunno - not a failure I would say. I get exactly the same on other addresses where people simply assume they must have that email address. Gmail’s setup doesn’t help here, but I actually find it rather useful for creating variations for sites that don’t allow plus addressing.
That I remember, recently I’ve had:
- Holiday photos from somebody’s close friend (not all SFW)
- Invoices for pool services (including the person’s name and address)
- Letters from lawyers regarding a divorce case
- Invites to a series of church events
- Reminders to bring my mini-van in for a service
And countless other things - all of this to a standard ISP email address. I actually get less misaddressed junk to my Gmail account…
Last Christmas I had to call someone in Florida to let her know that the iTunes account she set up for her son was using my e-mail address. She was wondering why the password resets never worked.
I contacted Apple about it the moment I got the first registration e-mail, since I don’t have iTunes, never have, and don’t want one. They ran me around, and still haven’t killed the account despite about ten contacts on my part. I finally went in, deleted all of the other person’s information, reset the password, and filled in completely bogus profile info. The accounts there, but no one can use it.
Yeah and as a way to beat bans on forums. Re-register with a dot in the email. Mostly I like gmail, but that one was, and still is a major fuckup.
There is an idiot in the UK who shares my first & last names who JUST DOESN’T UNDERSTAND HOW GMAIL WORKS. I get his mail all the time. If it were just spam and throwaway signups, I could understand, but I’ve gotten job offers, bank registration emails, personal correspondence—all kinds of insanity.
The best way to deal with it isn’t to create a filter. No—you should reply back and pretend to be that person. Because anyone who is too fucking stupid to give out the correct email address for truly important things deserves to be fucked with.
Maybe this response is too mean-spirited, but damn, I hate that jackass in the UK who can’t get this right, and my years-long annoyance with him really colors my overall opinion.
My GMail address is firstname.lastname and apparently it’s both easy to enter incorrectly (or for someone to hear something similar and translate it) and very similar to some guy in the UK.
- My address was entered for a client at a waxing salon in Florida. Full bikini wax, no less. I replied to two different appointment confirmation/thank you emails politely, then told them in no uncertain terms that they had a bad address and I was in fact a fairly hairy mid-30s dude in NY.
- I found myself on the mailing list for a high school girls’ volleyball team in CA. I had some fun with that one, until finally someone took action after I replied that I would wear a kilt in the traditional manner.
- Got a number of emails relating to the operations of some kind of school or synagogue program, including budget & expense information for a trip of some sort.
- Most recently, received a crap-ton of documents from a solicitor in St. Albans, UK pertaining to a real estate transaction. Lots of sensitive data in there. I replied nicely, telling them of their mistake, then got the documents again. I even went so far as to attempt to track the intended recipient down; I found a similar guy, but the right guy.
I got some correspondence from that person in Arkansas, I’ve been signed up for a dating website and an “Arkansas Adventure” site (what is is about Arkansas?? I wonder if they’re related . . . ), and, my favorite (which I believe actually was a typo): A message to beta read someone’s BDSM fanfic, and a list of kinks that would be included. I LAAAUGHED, especially when the next email in the list was an apology for sending to the wrong person, and that the first one might contain “personal information” that might make someone “uncomfortable”. 
OH, but I’m also getting a TON of Italian spam. I’m not sure what I did, or if Italians are just getting in on the spam market now, but it makes up more than 70% of my spam folder.
Mine seems pastoral by comparison… but someone in Florida was getting updates on the Orlando mayor’s state of Orlando address, and from other traffic I think is a senior member of a church. Took me several attempts to get them dissuaded.
I keep getting on the mailing list for updates to the state adjutant general’s weekly briefing. (That’s the senior officer in the state National Guard, a 3-star general.) I’m pretty sure the messages are intended for a lieutenant colonel chaplain who shares my last name. I offered to brief the general with my various concerns any time he was available, but they declined to take me up on that.
You have a friend with Italian settings on a computer that have been infected or something, or has Skype/msn and used a “see if someone has blocked me” service. Then your email gets sent to the Italian spammers. I’m getting Polish spam.
The few I get go directly into the SPAM folder. I got a bunch of filter from here (10 Must have Filters for GMail) a couple of years a go that were a great start. I’ve since added to it, but it did a fantastic job of sorting stuff.
Yup. They have an official system which is frequently down, unreliable, and difficult to access, requiring Windows and third-party drivers and software to install and configure a CAC reader. About the only good thing about it is the global address list with everyone in the system. But they still manage to send e-mail to me instead.
I was unable to access mail.mil for three days this week. No good reason. Just some database error. My preferred web address for accessing my web mail has changed three times since I switched over to mail.mil, requiring me to update my bookmarks on various computers. This is a minor annoyance, but it is an annoyance.
Since the OWA interface is the only access I have, and since I have to have Internet Explorer to make full use of it (e.g. S/MIME control), that means I have to be running Windows. The Army does not provide me with a computer, so I have to buy these things. Given these facts, I have no problem saying that it’s a much bigger pain in the ass for the end user than the AKO address that it replaced, which I could easily access using IMAP or via webmail on alternate operating systems.
The militarycac.com web site should not even exist if this is as easy for everyone as you suggest.
Don’t know your backstory or credentials, Dunerat, but Sig works for the DoD… full time… as a soldier. Maybe he’s seen some of the WNG mail system up close and personal?
Really, it’s owning Windows that is the biggest irritant to me. We should be using vendor-neutral solutions as much as humanly possible. Soldiers aren’t issued a computer; fine, I get it. We should be able to issue them a USB drive with a Linux distro configured to do everything they need, such that they could plug it in anywhere, boot the computer, and do Army business.
The existence of the very fine militarycac.com (put together by a Signals warrant officer on his own time) points to a major failing in the system. It is not at all shocking that soldiers (to most emphatically include the less technically savvy senior leaders) end up using other solutions to communicate. I joined Facebook primarily because it was the only reliable way to contact my First Sergeant and tell him he needed to jump through the hoops to check his e-mail.
I’m also in this fight though more of a secondary person. Civilian contractor for 1 of the arms of the military and one of the secondary fingers. I’m stuck with the AKO webmail piece as well and have seen it go down. Granted this is not on the .mil network or ARNET. And I hate the fact I can’t connect a mail client to it. The webmail is pretty nice, but nothing beats that full client.
And I do agree about the Linux side and the bootable USB idea. I think it would be fantastic. We’re regularly reformatting our training laptops because of people accessing this and that on them. A live USB image would solve all that.
Using the preferred address saves a few clicks and instances of selecting my certificate, since if I do it at web.mail.mil, I will have to do it again once it decides what server I’m to use. It’s a minor inconvenience, nothing serious.
I don’t even really care about using Windows, honestly; it’s just one more thing for the soldier to buy. If they’ve already got it, great, but we have a lot of alternative OS users, and it’s a bigger pain (I think) getting them to find a Windows box. If the thing was configured such that they didn’t have to do much in the way of administration, I don’t think it would be a big deal; most everything everyone does these days is web-based anyway.
(And I’m not sure I could ever leave the Debianosphere…)
Well, two parts to that. First, I’m active duty National Guard, so my biggest concern is the one-weekend-a-month soldiers who are not provided anything more than a USB CAC reader and a mandate to check their e-mail at least weekly.
I personally am full time, but I don’t have any accounts on the unclassified network because I don’t have an unclassified workstation anywhere convenient to me; it would be more trouble logging in periodically (to keep from getting my account suspended) than it would be worth. I’m reasonably tech savvy still and don’t have any problems installing and configuring things so I can do Army business at home; I just really resent that I have to, and recognize that many of my soldiers aren’t so able.
The Guard is in many ways closer to managing volunteers than a regular work force. You can make demands all you want, but if you don’t at least try to minimize the hoops people have to jump through, you’re not going to get much traction. I have very little leverage with junior soldiers not checking their e-mail when the officers won’t even do it, but that’s a separate rant.
It just bothers me because it doesn’t have to be this way. If I had this mythical thumb drive, I could carry it and a CAC reader and be able to check in from virtually anywhere. As it is, even our own computer labs frequently aren’t kept up to date enough to use the tools, so we have to bring our own laptops to digitally sign our evals, etc. If we’re going to require soldiers to BYOD, we ought to see where we can lower the bar for cost and convenience.
(Actually, this comes close in some respects. The Army still has a few pesky Windows-only apps, however, like the aforementioned evals.)