The recent issue of The New Yorker had a cute story, that I can totally relate to, about one particular G-Mail address account created four years ago:
On July 27, 2004, a friend invited Guru Raj to create a Google e-mail account. A recent graduate of the University of Virginia, Raj, then twenty-one, was watching the Democratic National Convention on a television in his parents’ basement, in Norcross, Georgia. The beta version of Gmail–available by invitation only–was less than four months old at the time, and largely unproved, but Raj’s U.V.A. e-mail account was set to expire in a few weeks, so he decided to give Gmail a try.
At first, Raj tried to create an address using his own name, but, remarkably, both gururaj @ gmail.com and rajguru @ gmail.com were already taken. So he tried the name of the young senator from Illinois who was giving the Democratic keynote address on TV. To his surprise, it worked, and, moments later, barackobama@gmail.com was quietly born. “I’m not some cute little Indian boy who grew up in America with political aspirations,” Raj, the first in his family to be born an American citizen, said recently. “I just thought it would be kind of funny to create an e-mail address based on a random senator whose name no one could spell…”Over the next four years, as Gmail became the third most popular Webmail provider in the U.S. and Obama became a serious contender for the next President of the United States, Raj used the account for his personal e-mail. In the fall of 2006, he received, for the first time, a message intended for the Senator. By February, 2007, when Obama formally announced his candidacy, Raj was daily receiving dozens of misdirected notes from all over the world.[Link]
I found this anecdote rather funny because on my (now-defunct) personal blog I wrote of encountering the same problem. Back when G-Mail first came out I snapped up three addresses. Two of them were quite obscure but the third one was the equivalent of “smith @ gmail.com.” Needless to say, over the years I have received all kinds of random emails from people who intended their message for someone(s) else. For example, I get at least two marriage-related biodata emails (complete with pictures) each week. I also get lots of people following up on a job interviews or medical results. A lot of these emails come from India. I am always faced with a choice: do I help destiny along by informing the sender of the error or by remaining silent? I randomly go either way 
(I know, this is probably evil and megalomaniacal).
Raj, who now works for a software consulting company in Washington, D.C., never replied to these, or to any other e-mails meant for Obama, not even to tell an excited would-be pen pal that he is not, in fact, the Democrats’ presumptive Presidential nominee. “It just became an interesting portal into Americana,” he said. “From the beginning, I had no intention of manipulating anyone.” .[Link]
Yes! See, Raj gets it. Its just like being the postal worker whose job it is to open all the mail addressed to Santa Claus. Nobody expects him to fulfill the expectations of every letter (or even a few letters), but at least someone can bear witness (even if they are biodata packages).
“bare witness”? I hope you don’t mean that literally.
Reminds me of the first e-mail I ever sent, back in the days when I lived in Kerala – to give the good news of getting an internet connection to my husband, who was abroad. Well, I hadn’t paid much attention to the order of the names in my husband’s e-mail address – so I sent the mail to George Thomas (not the real name,it is so much rarer than that) and promptly received a flirtatious reply from a Thomas George. After receiving three mails from that person, sent a strongly worded demand to stop pestering (Instead of hitting the reply button, had typed the address) and received a shocked and hurt response from another Thomas George, who had no clue what was going on. This time I had put a – instead of an _ between the names!
i think this raj dude should stop using this account as it might get him into trouble. it’s a bit silly.
No matter how young or not so well known a he is, I wouldn’t consider creating an email account in a US senator’s name as cute. It’s squatting and it’s intentional and it’s dirty
Is it doing any harm, though? He isn’t masquerading as Obama, and he isn’t replying to e-mails pretending to be Obama. It’s just a Gmail account. Now that the secret’s out, that may change things, but it certainly isn’t “dirty” or malicious.
Besides, if he deletes the account, someone else less pragmatic may snatch it up. He at least is being responsible.
that’s pretty interesting and i can some creepy advantages to this. for instance, the olys are sure to send up some new celebrities. one just has to squat on their names now, and wait till they bring in the gold. for example – who’dathunk saniamirza or sania_mirza or sania.mirza would be getting as much bandwidth as she is. someone really weird could use this to be all he/she can be on the internet. and pretty much that’s all that matters, no? ferinstance, one looks at the movie celebrities and they are accorded as much respect and news covereage for their views on climate change, genome splicing etc as some poor duck with a floofy ass cleavage who’s basically spent half the life draining rat blood down a sink or the equivalent thereof but has a publication list longer than ganesha’s mahabharat scrolls. so one could be next_supastar@gmail.com/ymail.com/hotmail.com/doodie.com and you live your life in a fantasy world – handing out decrees to the unwashed plebes.
I am wondering if any one offered to buy the address anytime from the present owner. If Mr. Obama becomes the President, the address could be more valuble as a collector’s item or the secret service may decide to confiscate it for national security reasons.
Abhi,
I totally feel your pain. I’ve been using Gmail since ’04 and love it, but I’ve been getting someone else’s messages fairly regularly. My address is “jay.kumar” while his is “jaykumar,” but I get a lot of resumes, biodata, billing statements, social networking invites, and plenty of other crap I have no interest in. I wonder if he’s getting mail meant for me, too. I’ve tried contacting Gmail to point out the mixup to them, but I’ve never heard back. I also sent the other dude an email forwarding something that seemed important, but never heard from him, either. At this point, I’ve been using the address too long to change to something else. I keep hoping the other guy switches to a new address.
As for the Obama address, I would think it’d be a hassle just getting all that mail.
8 · Jay said
This sounds like a fib. You can put a “.” anywhere before the “@” in a gmail address and it will go to the same place, i.e. I could send emails to “jay.kumar[at]gmail.com,” “j.aykumar[at]gmail.com,” and even “j.a.y.k.u.m.a.r[at]gmail.com” and they’d all land in the same inbox. Try it.
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