So You’ve Emailed the Wrong Email Address
Hi there! You’ve possibly been sent an email from a chap called Sean which contains a link to this web page. Let me explain.
I received your email. Your email has been successfully delivered to Sean Patrick Payne. If that’s who you were aiming to send it to, then congratulations! Sean will get around to reading it soon and will reply as soon as he possibly can.
If, however, you didn’t mean to send it to Sean Patrick Payne, then you’re one of the 50+ people who have sent Sean emails by accident within the last several years. Either you have mistyped the email address, or your colleague/friend/family member has misinformed you as to what their email address is (it’s quite surprising how many people think that Sean’s email address is theirs). You do not need to send apologies or get in contact, Sean will delete your email appropriately (he’s a really nice guy like that).
As much as Sean loves reading random correspondence from complete strangers, he’s actually getting a bit naffed off with the regularity of the accidental emails and thus has created this slightly sarcastic blog post to help deal with the issue. Past correspondence has included:
- An invitation to a wedding in California, which is a little bit out of Sean’s way given that he lives in the UK.
- Tickets to see the Oprah show live. Again, that’s a bit far to go and Sean isn’t a big fan of daytime TV.
- Numerous itineraries to clubs and groups (never for whiskey-tasting sessions, sadly).
- Job listings, mostly around the “New Pigsah Forest” area (wherever the hell that is).
- Attachments of someone’s professionally-shot baby pictures, which didn’t make Sean feel bloody awkward at all as he hastily deleted them.
- An email from a representative from a “secure” bank in America with thanks for setting up an account, confirmation that any future digital correspondence would come through to me and that they consider confidentiality to be one of their foremost features! Annoyingly this email was for someone who has given out my email address by accident before (I’m looking at you, Pamela Payne, whoever you are).
- Someone called Sienna signed up to a Christmas video message website and then continually spammed me with password reset requests. Sean had no choice but to log in to the account (with his email address, he hastens to point out) and delete the account.
- Paula Payne keeps using my email address by accident. I hope she enjoyed her flight between Detroit and North Carolina. Might have been a bit difficult to check in since all the confirmations came to me.
Funnily enough, Sean never gets sent anything of value like Swiss bank account details.
Sean genuinely owns this email account too, he’s had it since Google started their email service many, many years ago. He hasn’t hacked your colleague’s email account, and he’s 99.999% sure that the email address is his (that leaves 0.0001% just in case that multiple personality disorder he’s always wanted kicks in).
I hope you have enjoyed reading this blog post as much as I have writing it. You might consider clicking other pages on this blog for more random musings (I don’t always write in third-person perspective like I’m the bloody Queen, honest). Have a nice day.
Yours faithfully, Sean Patrick Payne.
Er, wait, what is all this about?
If you’ve just found this page by visiting my website, you’re probably wondering what this is all about! The text above was originally part of an autoresponder I originally set up to reply to all emails, given that it would also go to those who sent me an email by accident. Unfortunately after two years of being active I learned that having an autoresponder turned on all the time is a really, really bad idea as it lets spammers know which email addresses are active.
My email address is terribly generic and just simple enough to be mistyped by anyone trying to target someone with my initials (I obviously can’t post what it is here lest it be scraped by bots for spammers and hackers to target!). I still get the occasional email sent to me like the ones described above and I was fond of the autoresponder message, so I have posted it up here so I can send it to any other people who accidentally send me mail that was supposed to go to someone else.
Incidentally, if you do need to contact me, you can use the “harrass Sean” contact form on my website.
Post by Sean Patrick Payne+ | January 7, 2017 at 11:39 am | Real Life, Technology | No comment
Tags: Please just check what bloody email address you have typed before clicking send, spam