At some point in the not-so-distant past, my personal email address somehow ended up in a mailing list maintained by the US Democratic Party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To be clear, I did not sign myself up with them. And while I have a suspicion as to how my name was hoovered by the Democrats, I can’t prove it. Occassionally I get emails from people who don’t quite know their own email addresses because they’ve used mine for something important like registering with a medical practitioner. I’m certainly not sophisticated enough to have unique email addresses for every place I sign up to enable me to track email addresses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They’re using my Gmail address, except not quite in the form that I use it. I have a dot<\/em> in mine, but Gmail actually ignores those, so firstname.surname@gmail.com <\/em>is treated the same as firstnamesurname@gmail.com<\/em> in Gmail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And to be honest, I could probably have stopped the emails in their tracks, but I found it interesting to see what kind of volume of emails would come through. So I created a filter that kept the emails clear from Inbox and they just drop-in. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Here’s a chart showing how the emails flow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n