I’m starting to think that something about me — or about my Google Mail address, specifically — intersects with a group of people who might be among the dullest knives in the drawer. A week doesn’t go by where I don’t receive at least a dozen misaddressed emails to that account; we’re not talking about spam, but rather we’re talking about long, personal emails from someone who’s letting me know that they’re moving to a new house, or sharing the pictures of the party we ostensibly attended together a few days ago, or even my favorite repeat offender, a mother who is passing on the odd bit of news to all her kids. I get full screenplays emailed to me for proofreading, I get confidential legal documents for my review, I even received a set of robo-calling scripts from the Democratic Party of Virginia a few weeks ago. All of these are misaddressed, intended for some other individual with an GMail address similar to mine. I even get people mistyping their own email addresses into web forms, such as all the confirmation emails I received from American Airlines last week for another J. Levine’s flight to London, or the bunch of forwards I got from another J. Levine’s corporate account two weeks ago (forwards which included truly awesome legal letters between a mother and her sons, full of threats of disinheritance and ill will).
I used to get frustrated at all the misaddressed email I receive at my GMail account, but now I treat it as a surreal break from reality, a glimpse into the weirdness that gets passed along in email every day. Maybe I should put up a site with all the email, if for no other reason than to teach people that those long disclaimers they put at the end of their emails (“if you’ve received this in error, you must delete it immediately”, etc.) are meaningless.
