Janet Kornblum is finding out more than she would like about a guy named Josh Kornblum:

When I picked out jkornblum on Gmail those many years ago, I was in a race. I also had jkornblum@aol.com (now used only by spammers) because I joined before AOL had hit a million customers. I have other jkornblums: Twitter, Amazon and sites that have gone the way of Kozmo. (Pretty sure my user name for Kozmo was jkornblum.) I was in a race to make all the jkornblums mine.

We did stupid things like that back in the early days, racing for user names. That was when we thought there would be limited user names and limited URLs (back when you couldn’t just find a company simply searching for it). […]

But the real fallout I never could have predicted: Years down the line, after my successful mad dash for jkornblums, I often get emails for other jkornblums. jkornblums I will never meet, with whom I obviously share some kind of a heritage but little else.

My (non-trumwill) email address is not prone to error. Ultimately, though, this is a variation of finding out a whole lot of interesting things about the last person to have your phone number.

Of course, this wouldn’t be an issue if they’d use more domain names.