Mr. Nice Guy? Who's He?

Here’s a little oddity that showed up in my Mac mail inbox this morning:


This is not the first time I have received misdirected e-mail from someone in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Evidently there is some high official in the LDS organization who shares my name, and there are other folks in the Mormon fold who have somehow turned up my mac.com address and have convinced themselves that I am he. Or he is I. Or however it goes. And without a second thought, apparently, or even a first thought, they sling their message to my mailbox and go skipping on about their own business.

I refer you now to my post of September 16, 2008, “No More Mr. Nice Guy!” In it, you may or may not recall, or care, I groused about receiving fairly frequent e-mail intended for a Mary Ann Reynolds (both she and her friends seem to have trouble rendering her e-mail address, the result being that a distressing amount of it ends up in my Yahoo inbox), and my failed attempts to get her and her friends to change their ways and adjust their address books. I found, over a period of a couple of years, that businesses were quick to reply to my correction, and to apologize—although that wasn’t the point: I was actually trying to be a nice guy (as the title implied)—but that none of the “real people” whom I helpfully responded to could be bothered to acknowledge my e-mail, let alone thank me for taking the time to point out that they had the wrong address. Finally I reached the point where I added these senders to my block list, and gave up on them. They can spend eternity wondering why Mary Ann never responds to their e-mail.

Well, I am at about that same point with the Mormons. Every time I have received a misdirected message intended for the “other” William Reynolds, I have promptly and pleasantly responded to it and encouraged the sender to make the necessary correction in order to ensure that his or her messages get to the proper party in a timely fashion. I have never had the courtesy of a reply for my trouble (again, not the point), and the misdirects just keep on coming (and that is the point!). In fairness, this is the first I’ve received from this particular sender...but far from the first I’ve received from his “stake.”

So I’m afraid I’ve reached the same conclusion with these guys as I did with Mary Ann and her pals, viz., no more Mr. Nice Guy. I’m inclined to agree with Thunderbird that this message is junk, and to let the senders and the intended recipient sort it all out on their end.

Maybe that’s the only way they’ll learn.

Maybe they’ll never learn.

That certainly seems to be the case so far.