i’ve been receiving a growing number of “wrong number”-type email messages. it started a couple of years ago with one or two every couple of months; now i am receiving about one per week. while this is more of a nuisance than a real problem, i feel like it is just one more unintended consequence of the way this socio-technical system that we call the Internet works.
the problem is, there seem to be quite a number of people out there who either can’t type, or don’t know the gmail address of the person they’re trying to reach, or are given misinformation, or something, and end up using my email address by mistake. this is not spam — these are honest-to-goodness “wrong numbers”. i got in on gmail fairly early, and my email address is just my first name. it is a fairly uncommon spelling, to be sure, but i still thought it was pretty cool (actually, i still think it is pretty cool) to get my first name @gmail.com
one time i was added to a course mailing list for some nursing program at a school in california. another time, i was copied for two weeks on emails for some group project at another university before somebody finally corrected the address when they hit “reply to all”. another time some guy gave me permission to see his photos on picasa thinking he was inviting his girlfriend — turns out, there were a lot of pictures of her flashing her naked breasts while visiting landmarks around new york city. i get a lot of emails about my child (i don’t have a child) wanting to create an account on “moshi monsters” or “club penguin”. i have been invited to baby showers for people i have never heard of, i have received airline reservations for complete strangers, i’ve been signed up for myspace and eharmony multiple times… and now i have received a message from someone’s cell phone containing a photo of herself taken in what looks like the mirror of a public bathroom. what the heck?
in a way, this is an information management problem (hello? use the right email address!). but for me, as the recipient of these messages, the asynchronous nature of the communication is problematic. if you dial a wrong number when making a phone call, you usually get instant feedback that you’ve screwed up. not so with email; one could wait for days, becoming more and more upset about not receiving a reply, without ever knowing the email went to the wrong person. whenever possible, i reply to the erroneous mails to let the sender know they have made a mistake (the guy with the half naked photos of his girlfriend seemed pretty embarassed when i told him i wasn’t who he thought i was). but what about the cases where someone has entered my email address into an online account creation form? in that case, i don’t have anybody to contact — i just have to wait for the account to go away when i don’t click the confirmation URL in the email.
also, while the protocols that comprise the Internet do a lot of acknowledging among themselves when packets have not been received, etc., this information does not make it up to the level of the user. most mail systems, if they are nice, let you know when you send a message to an account that doesn’t exist. but what about if you mess up the part after the @ sign? then you rely on your own mail system to tell you that a message you tried to send is still in circulation and hasn’t been delivered. these notifications are usually written in some technical language that an average user can’t understand, and signify some failure at a technical level that may or may not be due to something the user typed in to the mail client.
also, it seems like the reason for the mistaken delivery is important when considering what kind of information the user would need, and when, to keep this kind of thing from happening. for example, it is a very different issue if the mistake happens due to a typo, vs. a misunderstanding (or misinformation) about the email address — in one case, the person actually knows the correct email address for the person they are trying to reach; in the other they do not.
for my part, i don’t think i will ever be requesting an email address that is just my first name ever again…
