Dear Email Address Sharer,

Thanks so much for granting me such an insight into your life. I genuinely can’t believe that you would willingly let someone openly view your receipts for Olive Garden purchases, get your notifications for when your pet is due a service or when your Honda needs a trim (hang on, is that the wrong way round?)

I’m touched to be an intimate part of your human connections, and your conversations with friends (one sided, natch, as they try to get hold of you) are a distinct eye opener into the mundane life that we all have underneath our superhero surfaces.

I’m also really delighted you’re a Hillary Clinton supporter, too. Although I’m in the UK and therefore unable to vote in the US Presidential Election, rest assured I’d have the same political views as you. I’m sorry, but I did have to manage the email subscription frequency though; daily requests for a donation did get to be a bit much — but I know that’s Hillary’s fault, not yours.

Oh, and while I’m at it, that one time you signed up for plentyoffish? You may have noticed that your connections abruptly lost the boy they were messaging. Yeah, sorry, that was me again. Wow, you were really popular though! I had to request a password reset, log into your account, and shut it down — my wife was wondering why I was getting so many emails from strange women — but once I showed her the details you’d entered into your account she understood.

Like me though, she didn’t quite understand one thing:

If you can buy food from Olive Garden, own multiple pets all over the USA, have at least three cars that need servicing (at the last count), and such a huge variation of assorted family members all over the country — as well as at least five different first names — then why on earth can’t you type your email address correctly?

Seriously? I was an early adopter of Gmail, and have had this account for over ten years. The email address really isn’t hard to type, but you seem to do it wrong a lot.

I know you’ll never get this message, in the same way you won’t get all those reminder emails; I get them instead, and I can only sign you out of so many services at once, or send polite messages to your friends to ask them to check the email address they have for you. I also know that a problem of this nature is such a combination of white whine and first worldery that I’ll be fortunate if many people get this far down the page.

But if you do read it, and you do wonder why you didn’t get that confirmation email? Please, go check what email address you typed. And then send an apologetic message to the poor sod who’s been getting your notifications for years and continually resists the opportunity to do something malicious with them.

Thanks so much,
John.