Now, it would be easy to mistake a miss-directed email as spam, but one example was a Jan Burge who had signed up for a service (requiring activation of course) and sent me the activation email used to confirm the email addie. (nicely done, genius…)

Another example; the other day I learned about B-day plans for someone’s Father… apparently a Jon Burge.

The thing that I’m not really sure of; how one would go about reporting a wrong addie similar to a wrong number? This is even harder when, as in the case of the first example, a webmaster’s web-bot sent the email and any reply to that address wouldn’t likely be seen by a person (this is just the assumption I made, it may not be so…).  But it seems kinda rude to just send an email “HEY you got the wrong person!!” (I find it very hard to say it nicely, including ‘I’m sure it was an innocent mistake’, and other qualifiers). I think the problem has to do with the impersonal way we use email to communicate. When you know the person who emailed you, it is usually easy to grasp their tone and intent. however,with a stranger, it can be easy to missinterpret genuine concern as discomfort of rogue emails.

If you accidentally send an email to the wrong address and the person emails you back bringing your mistake to attention do you send an apology email or just leave the communication hanging as is??  [poll id="2"]

I think this is a great example of how we are constantly defining new norms and courtesy without any common direction.  I have to admit that they few times that I take the time to email someone back who wrongly emailed me (or in one case I forwarded it to the email address I thought they meant given their name) I kinda expected something simple like, “OMG sorry” nothing more, but just a reply to conclude the communication (done out of courtesy not necessity).

Luckily, wrong emails aren’t nearly as annoying as wrong numbers (especially given the time of evening the calls usually occur).

LOL, as I was writing this I got yet another wrong email address… but I finally got a polite reply

“My apologies, thank you”

see that’s all I was looking for.