Yea I own first.last@gmail.com for my name too and I get emails for who I think is the same person fairly often. Like job stuff, professional education emails, etc. I used to reply to them saying wrong person but have given up...the guy must not care about not getting these emails...
My first name is very uncommon and my last name is very common.
I am on the other side of this problem and was surprised because it is very easy to contact me. When the other person with my name forwarded the emails, it was all careless and unwanted recruiter mail. Someone goes into work, types first.last@gmail, and hits send without doing one Google search. Incredible.
I'm in the same boat, except my first and last name are fairly common.
My gmail account is not my primary email address, and to be honest I don't know if I could manage making it my primary because of the amount of rubbish I get.
I recently wanted to introduce someone to our internal recruiters to a person with a long, uniqueish name. The recruiter was like: they did respond with „I’m not interested“. But the person was like: I’ve never got a mail.
Turned out the whatever tool our recruiter used spit out „first.lastname@gmail.com“ even though the person in question doesn’t own that email.
I've gotten a wide enough variety of stuff (mortgage paperwork, homeowners insurance, game service accounts) that some of it has to be organically entered, but that is a good note. Crazy that any system would be set up that way, but HR tech is a clusterfuck.
I am lastname.firstname@gmail.com, but I wouldn't be surprised if something similar is happening in some instances.
My first name is very uncommon and my last name is very common.