Never happens to me :( the sadness of having a rare name.

gmail does not recognize periods, I think. So if you are jdoe and someone else is j.doe they are treated the same?

I've had something similar happen once - mainly because my name is not very common.

Remember when Yahoo opened up the option for real name aliases? I snagged mine, but it's a common enough name that I occasionally get people thinking that it's theirs and so I'll get signups for all sorts of sites. I hit a LOT of unsubscribe links.

I have several doppelgangers on Gmail. I've just gotten used to it by now.

Someone stole my original GMail name - they hijakced my account 10 years ago when it was new. I couldn't get it back. I assume they're still out there with it, and I had to open another account with my middle initial, which I hate.

I keep getting someone's high school reunion notices. He shares my last name but not my first name (or my gender). I have no idea where they dug up my gmail address to attach to him.

I was on a mailing list for youth soccer coaches in suburban Los Angeles for a while and I ended up having to spam the whole list to finally get enough attention for them to take me off.

Right now I keep getting emails from the Phoebe Physician Group who seems to think that I'm a patient of theirs. I tried to unsubscribe but they wanted the answer to a security question that I (obviously) didn't know.

I've gotten two types of wrong emails: people who take a stab at it being someone's email and one person who doesn't know their own email.

The first could be kind of amusing. I'd get weird vacation photos and stray bits, but usually it was pretty obvious that it was the kid of thing that would be cleared up as soon as either party talked to the other. A handful of times over what is now decades, it seemed like something important and I'd intervene, but in the last few years there was this one person who didn't seem to know or care it was the wrong address. With the volume of email I was dealing with, I didn't really care until the point where it was obvious they had recently hung out. So I thought it was almost over until the next one which was a lengthy and offensive Obama bashing camaraderie thing, at which point I deployed my oft used, "Whoever you think I am, you are very wrong." I wish I'd had time and wherewithal to say more.

When one of my aliases was a common generic name I got great stuff, esp. since one of my alters was either a casting agent or worked for a big network. I miss that email, as those alters got around.

The second doesn't know their own email and I'd love to disclose personal information to make sure she corrects this error because her taste in sign ups is appalling and I do not want to be put in charge of any more of her church groups, but I think a small liturgical throw down might have remedied this situation.

Gmail is by far the worst for this. And the ignoring dots thing just makes it worse.

My friend deals with this a lot and created a twitter account about it.
https://twitter.com/wrongamywatson

gmail does not recognize periods, I think.

That's correct. One would think that the enormous brain trust at Google would have thought to build-in a safeguard against people using periods, but no.

I have the same thing - there's another person with a very similar name in California, and sometimes she signs me up for mailing lists and every once in a while I get an obviously personal email or invite for her, and I politely let them know it's not me - I've been lucky and they have always responded by correcting it.

Mr. N has the same problem, but to a way worse degree - there are many many people that think his gmail address is theirs.

The big reason I didn't do something sooner about that guy was because I thought he was being blown off in part because he was a dork or a non native speaker, but no, he was just another semi illiterate racist. Politeness always bites me in the ass.