Opening someone else’s email
I signed up to Gmail during the summer of 2004. Surprisingly, and unlike every single one of my friends (or anyone else I knew, for that matter), I was able to grab my first name @ gmail.com.
Google has actually put in place a policy of preventing the most common first names from ever being used. That is, you can’t get john@gmail.com or karen@gmail.com, not because someone else got it first, but because nobody is allowed to get those names in the first place.
Google might have taken philosophy and applied it across international names too - my name is unique here (I think I’ve only met 2 other people in the US with it), but it’s somewhat common back in my parents’ home country of India - but fortunately for me, they did not.
So I snagged my short, seven letter name, and have been wielding it with an unearned pride to everyone that happened to ask me for my email address.
“You seriously got that name?” people often say.
“Yeah, it’s cool.” *shrug*
Secretly though, over the last year or two, I’ve begun to grow weary of my first name email. It’s a unique name here in the US, but as I said before, there are millions, maybe millions upon millions of people, in India, with the same name. The issue is that, for every person with my first name out there, there are hundreds of people that are friends or colleagues of them. So to put it roughly, we could say there are some hundred+ million people out there who know someone with my first name.
And of course, some of that hundred+ million want to send an email to this individual they know. And some of them will not know this person’s address. Or they’re not used to sending real emails. Or they make a transcribing mistake. So, of a hundred+ million people out there sending emails to their dear my_first_name’s, a non-insignificant portion of these mistakenly get sent to me.
I’ve received blueprints. I’ve received business contracts. I’ve received emails marked CONFIDENTIAL. I’ve received financial documents of private companies. I’ve received account information from people, including usernames and passwords for highly trafficked sites. I’ve received love letters, and then follow-ups wondering why the love-of-their-life hasn’t responded. I delete those too.
In the deafening silence of my non-reply, I may be ruining love lives, business deals, or who knows what else. I quietly smile to myself, with a mild sadistic tinge, when I smash Delete on a businessman requesting an extended per diem for his business trip. Request denied. Or the relative wondering when her cousin will come visit her. Not this year, apparently.
Maybe Google had a point when it decided to restrict first-name-only emails. Now I am bearing the consequences of their overlooked loopholes. This joke’s getting tiring. But I’m not switching just yet.
