What do you do with misdirected email?

For a few months now, I’ve been getting email addressed to my [email protected] account from a guy named Keith. The emails haven’t been for me, but rather for someone named Diane Misener. Apparently we have very similar email addresses.

For months, I simply deleted Keith’s email. I know I shouldn’t have, but I deleted the first one because it was one of those joke email forwards that people send around, and I figured it was just a mistake. Then another one arrived, and another one, and I deleted those too. Eventually it got to the point where I couldn’t contact Keith to explain the mistake, because doing so would mean admitting I’d silently deleted all of his email to Diane.

Eventually, I started to feel pretty bad about all of this, so I phoned up Keith and Diane. The whole story is on this week’s episode of Spark.