This is not “aviation” but it’s relevant to a previous thread on webmail.
Yesterday I got an email from a long-term supplier of my business, in Japan. It was addressed to Peter Bloggs (and at my correct business email).
Where the hell did they get the “Bloggs” from? That’s not my surname.
It so happens that when google forced the use of a google login for youtube, that got tied up with the use of my business email for by firm’s google analytics control panel, which is stupid but fair enough. So, on youtube, I changed the surname on there from my real one to “Bloggs”.
And now, the Japanese company must (I guess) have enter my email address into their gmail account and google filled in the “Peter Bloggs” from their database!
In the right circumstances, it’s a great way to find out somebody’s full name from their email address, if they use that full name combined with that email address for any google-owned service.
By virtue of using Google services, you become the product. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
When you get your s6 visit the privacy s section in settings and see how much stuff they want to collect by default! I’ve turned most of it off.
Thanks for that tip 
I will pick the phone up when I get back from holiday – ~ 7th June. I vaguely recall something similar in my 8.4" Samsung tablet…
I have just seen two more cases of this – both from people who absolutely know who I am and have my full name. Both use Gmail.
This time, “joe Bloggs” (spelt that way) got added to my personal email address; the one many of you have.
I reckon Google is lifting data which it gets from android phone app shop identities (for which a lot of people, myself included, use a bogus name) and auto-populating all Gmail address books (that contain the email address used on the android app shop account) with it, and doing this for all their customers.
But not 100% consistently.
I wonder whether it is only people on Gmail who have my email address in their contacts but do not have my name (or any name) next to it, get this auto-population from Google.
It is proving difficult to get the people to pin down the exact process. The case which made me start this thread (a supplier in Japan, not on Gmail but possibly using Google hosted email) never replied – I asked them 3 times. The next one deleted my name in his address book and re-typed it, which is fine but it prevented one from tracking it down.
A huge privacy issue for anybody who has set up an email address that doesn’t reveal their name, but does use their real name in some context accessible to Google.
Peter wrote:
find out somebody’s full name from their email address
That’s why I hate people sharing other people’s e-mail addresses. An e-mail address is a private thing! (This happens for example when people don’t know how to use the BCC field when sending out a newsletter or some chain letter for example)
I have found out where Google is getting the “joe Bloggs” (this exact spelling) which it is automatically adding to emails which some gmail users send to my (usual) email address:
It’s a name I have used to buy apps in the google app shop, for my Samsung 8.4" tablet! I got that tablet early in 2015 so it has taken a while for it to start.
I still have not been able to get any of those people (about 5 so far) to describe the exact process they use to send those emails, but it started on / around 1st June. They are unrelated people, all over the world. One of them says he doesn’t use an “address book” but surely Gmail must be implementing some sort of an address book if it auto-fills a name when you start to enter a name or an email address?
Maybe it happens only when using some app to access gmail, but none of the people has been able to describe whether they use an app or a browser. One person I have asked to try it (who has a totally fresh gmail account, and uses a browser) has not been able to make it happen.
The “Peter Bloggs” in the first post in this thread originates from an identity I use to access a Google Analytics control panel which covers a couple of websites.
This happens for example when people don’t know how to use the BCC field when sending out a newsletter or some chain letter for example
Some cases I have seen are hilarious, while some are massive security breaches 
As you know, we have exchanged emails, and so I typed ‘Peter’ into my gmail contacts search bar, and to my surprise I did see: ‘joe Bloggs’.
‘Contacts’ is what gmail calls its address book. And it seems to be more than just an address book, gmail also invites me to ‘hang out with’ joe and to ‘start a video call with’ joe.
The blued-out bit is not gmail.com. I don’t think it is particularly secret, but I am cautious in these matters, and anyway you know what it is :-)
You asked about the “email mechanism”:
To send email I use gmail with a facility to get replies back to ‘myname@mydomain’. I think the email header is ‘on-behalf-of’ rather than ‘reply-to’. I send mostly from a PC (google chrome browser), but quite often from an android phone or tablet (google gmail app).
Incoming email arrives at ‘myname@mydomain’ but gmail polls that email server every few minutes so I can see it in gmail on the PC, tablet, and phone.
It is not obvious to me where the ‘joe Bloggs’ came from. I just checked your incoming emails (raw text) and ‘joe Bloggs’ did not appear in any header or body. Like you, I think it must have come from Google indirectly.
Hope that helps…
Brilliant, @DavidS, thanks.
Did google offer the “joe” stuff as you were typing in “peter”? (i.e. without pressing any Submit-like buttons)
I have checked incoming emails from gmail users and it started close to 1st June 2015. Most cases of it were not noticed (by me).
So far as I remember I hit mostly ‘reply’, though one email did come from [email protected] and I typed in the quoted address manually.
I just sent an email to ‘peter’ via google chrome browser, and it auto-completed ’joe Bloggs, so I expect that is what you will see.
I also had the option to send to ‘peter at euroga.org’, but there was no ‘joe Bloggs’ associated with that.
