Eighteen and Abandoned : The New Yorker

I scrounged up an extra Gmail invite and typed a bunch of commonly used words into the account-creation page, hoping to unearth an especially desirable unclaimed e-mail address. I eventually arrived at eighteen@gmail.com.

As I waited patiently to receive a big money offer for the address from Peyton Manning or Darryl Strawberry, or maybe even Alice Cooper, I ignored eighteen@gmail.com. I never even checked the account following an initial test to be certain it was accepting messages. After a few months devoid of calls from Johnny Damon, I put the e-mail address and the windfall it promised out of my mind, seemingly for good.

But when I recently logged into an old Yahoo e-mail account I still use for ordering flowers and entering N.C.A.A. basketball-tournament bracket contests, a message from “Google Account Recovery” greeted me with a cold reminder of my past e-mail-related shenanigans. It offered no salutation, cutting right to the chase: “To initiate the password-reset process for your eighteen@gmail.com Google Account, click the link below.” I followed the instructions and found myself in the in-box of a Gmail account that had not been checked since George W. Bush was serving his first term as President and “Thefacebook” was something available only to certain college kids. What I discovered was a treasure trove of bizarre and ridiculous e-mail messages. My long-since-forgotten, get-rich-quick Gmail account had somehow mutated into something huge while I was away.

It turns out that eighteen@gmail.com (let’s call it—him?—“eighteen” for short) had been admitted to a four-year college that features a mascot named Roary the Lion, helped fund a successful Presidential campaign, traded e-mails with a major television network, treated itself to fabulously over-the-top shopping sprees, and, just for good measure, volunteered to work at the PetSmart on 117th Street in East Harlem.

In total, not counting spam, eighteen had received four thousand three hundred and eighty-two e-mails since I registered the account in 2004. Early on, things were pretty slow. In its first year of existence, the account received exactly thirty e-mails—mostly from senders named Mailer-Daemon, System Administrator, and Mail Delivery Subsystem. By 2006, eighteen had graduated to receiving various offers to purchase software programs, pharmaceuticals, and DVDs, but the account was still pretty much a snoozer.

Everything changed in April, 2008. That’s when someone from California named Mark listed eighteen as his preferred e-mail address in the course of donating ten dollars to the Obama campaign. Since then, Team Obama has sent eighteen@gmail.com nine hundred and forty-one e-mails; everyone from Maya Angelou to Bill Clinton reached out to eighteen on behalf of the President. A local organizer sent several e-mails that seem to hint at Mark’s town of residence, and the “to” line of every Obama-related e-mail included Mark’s last name.

Following the Obama donation, the number of e-mails sent to eighteen increased exponentially. Kohl’s, Barnes & Noble, Express, and J. C. Penney have each sent hundreds. During the same month that Mark provided the account address while funneling ten dollars to Obama, someone listed it in registering a complaint to the ABC television network, which responded with unsatisfying and poorly punctuated boilerplate. At one point, the eighteen@gmail.com address was used to vote in a Doritos promotion in Canada premised on determining which of two unappetizing-sounding tortilla-chip flavors—Onion Rings ’n’ Ketchup or Buffalo Wings ’n’ Ranch—would be “destroyed, and taken off shelves forever.” A few months later, eighteen ordered an online baseball video that promised to increase the velocity of its fastball.

During the span of nearly a decade, eighteen received a plethora of highly suspect advice (about Des Moines, for instance, from someone corresponding about L.S.U. sports bars: “Aside from the winter, it’s not a bad place to be.”) and made what, in retrospect, may have been some poor decisions. Did eighteen really need to purchase three-in-one Beauty Smoothies in four different flavors—including Yum Yum Yumberry and Cocoa Velvet Truffle—from a company called Ulta Beauty as part of an order totalling $86.38?

What is perhaps most interesting about the hollow, empty-jar existence of eighteen are the e-mails that hundreds of individuals—real people with Facebook accounts, and provided phone numbers, and other hallmarks of actual personhood—mistakenly sent to the account when intending to communicate with someone else. In addition to all the e-mails addressed to Mark, the account has also received messages meant for Ryan, Wilfredo, Alan, Mr. Smith, and Marcellus, among tens of other names.

A woman named Sara, from somewhere in England, sent eighteen the following note:

hey pet. what’s the story rory. just writin to say hi and hope your doin well. we are coming over in april. i think there will be 3 or 4 of us coming this time if that is ok with jacqui and your dad. well ya better write back. send my love to everyone except craig and pots. haha. lots of love sara.

A few years later, eighteen received an e-mail from the good folks at the Mercedes-Benz Richmond Service Centre in British Columbia confirming an appointment with a mechanic named Luiz. The message promised a “check-engine light preliminary diagnosis” and established that eighteen had requested a “shuttle to home.”

In August, 2009, the director of advising, counselling, and testing services at Missouri Southern State University, in Joplin, Missouri, reached out to eighteen with orientation information as part of an e-mail that began, “Congratulations on your enrollment here at M.S.S.U.!”

Less than a year later, eighteen—at this point presumably a rising sophomore at M.S.S.U. and a building-design wunderkind—received an interesting proposition under the subject heading “Architectural design for a 3 bedroom bungalow.” Someone living in Toronto wrote, “I got your name & email from Ellen. She indicated that you may be interesting to design this house for me. I can provide more details and some sketches if we can meet sometime between June 21 to June 25 next week.” A cell-phone number followed.

By the autumn of 2010, eighteen was moving up in the world, and admirers were beginning to enter the picture. In September of that year, a message popped up under the subject heading “Bathing suit!” The corresponding e-mail was a model of efficiency. It read, simply, “Me!” Attached to the message was a photo of a middle-aged black woman posing at the edge of an indoor pool while wearing a bright, royal-blue, one-piece swimsuit and some red flip-flops. The sender came across as neither modest nor timid in the photograph. Two years later, the photo of a trim thirtysomething woman in a gold-zippered, black leather jacket sitting on a couch appeared in the in-box with no accompanying message.

Not everything has been swimsuits and selfies for eighteen, though. Near the end of this past year, eighteen, apparently back home from school for winter break in Alexandria, Louisiana, and experiencing hair-loss issues, ran into some plumbing problems. Ultimately, the account received good news on the bathroom front: “The service request for service issue #6088-1, ‘Tub clogged’ was completed on 12/31/2012 12:56:00 PM. The technician completed the following action(s): Replaced drain stopper.” Home-maintenance issues, it turns out, are nothing new for eighteen. In the autumn of 2008, eighteen somehow commissioned Dr. Sarup’s Pest Control to assess a termite problem at an apartment in the town of Malayattoor, in Kerala, India. Dr. Sarup responded via e-mail and suggested “drilling hole up to 15 cm depth and 50 cm width along the wall side injecting chemicals and spraying chemicals to the floor wherever marble is not laid.” The quoted price, in rupees: “Fifteen thousand only.”

Recently, someone became convinced that eighteen@gmail.com was the appropriate place to submit his dental-school personal statement. (Sample passage: “One of the most important qualities [dentists] need is manual dexterity with their hands. I have developed strong finger dexterity, chiseled from years of playing the clarinet and piano.”)

Alas, eighteen hasn’t found the time to make a final admissions decision about the deftly digited dental-student-to-be, what with graduation from M.S.S.U. fast approaching and a new PetSmart gig a thousand two hundred and sixty-six miles away in Manhattan. (“The shifts take no more than 2 hours. Please let me know what days/times you would be able to volunteer.”)

So be it.

Go to town, prospective dental students and lovers of every Beauty Smoothie flavor under the sun. Do your thing. Flood the in-box, if you like. From this point on, eighteen@gmail.com belongs to us all. That is, of course, unless Peyton Manning finally decides to hit me up with a solid offer.

Illustration by Kate Prior.