Why I closed my Gmail account.
Posted on May 27, 2011 by Philip Newman
This afternoon I decided to take steps required to close my Gmail account due to a peculiar situation that has been accruing over the last 12 months.
I signed up to Gmail almost instantly to be able to keep get philip.newman@. It is a good service and don’t get me wrong Google has come up with a fine product. Gmail’s spam filtering in my opinion is the best out there. So why have I closed my account?
Over the last 6-8 months I’ve started receiving email to another Philip Newman. His address was philipnewman@ so exactly the same as mine without the period between names. While we both had separate accounts Gmail started leaking some of his emails across into my account. For about a month I was getting one or two emails directed at Dr. Philip Newman.
At first it was a joke until seemingly important emails were being sent to my account. The same was happening to my account. Emails people were sending me were going into his account and this was somewhat of a problem as almost everything I’ve signed up with sends passwords to that account when I recover them.
I contacted Google and in typical style I got an auto response saying thank you for contacting us blah blah blah. Nothing was ever done about it so again I sent an email and nothing came back other than the default email.
I started to get private stuff from this other Philip Newman and knew almost instantly how many over priced bottles of wine he had on the way via FedEx. At first this was amusing but it started to get uncomfortable when this guy from the other side of the world would reply to emails I’d been sent.
The weird thing is I couldn’t send email to philipnewman@ because they would just appear in my inbox so something was extremely wrong with ‘the system’ or the way my account had been set up. It was only after this other Philip Newman contacted me and asked me to stop spamming his account.
I have now completed closing my account.
