My inbox is piling up with spam again and my email doppelgänger is to blame | Shelley Hepworth

This feeling is just another example of the kind of one-sided parasocial relationship that is so ubiquitous in this era of mass media and digital communication. These people are strangers to us, but through small glimpses of their lives we feel as if they're not.

That's due to a media psychology phenomenon called the media equation, according to Elizabeth Cohen, an assistant professor of communication studies at West Virginia University.

"We tend to process things socially, even if they're not really social," Cohen says. "So, for instance, we act polite and considerate to machines such as computers and cars, even though we know they aren't human.

"We also empathise with celebrities even though we've never met them before, and we grieve for fictional characters even though they're not even real. This occurs because we are, as a matter of human nature, hardwired to be social."

There's Katerina in New York who didn't show up for her second Covid vaccine, Ashley in Texas who owes her chiropractor $3,000, and the one who has a friend in North Carolina who likes to send photos of hamburgers.

Katie has been getting these emails for years and admits they can be a drag.

There was also the woman who bought a Nissan Pathfinder in Las Vegas. "I was getting reminders for her to service her vehicle. I felt kind of bad for her because I wondered if she just couldn't afford it," Katie says.

This makes me think of the kind of narrative you might construct about a stranger passing in the street. There is something innately fascinating about catching a glimpse into someone else's world and imagining what their life is like.

In the online world, we are constantly surrounded by a kind of digital version of people-watching, only instead of a particular attitude or sense of style, we read people through their digital ephemera: what they subscribe to, where they live, or their travel and eating habits.

"In digital media environments, there's often not a lot of identity cues that you can gather about other people, compared to face-to-face communication at least, so the cues that you do get carry a lot of weight," Cohen says.

"When you get a small little snapshot of somebody's life - somebody who shares something similar to you, like a name, by getting a misaddressed email - it's pretty intriguing. It might not be much knowledge, but it kind of feels like an intimate knowledge because it's personal."

So what do you about these people?

"Precisely, 4/24/2021, 12:00 PM, meet at these coordinates, (40.8223286°N 96.7982002°W) we fight, whoever wins gets to keep the name, everyone else has to change their name, you have a year to prepare, good luck," Swain wrote.

A year later, hundreds of people named Josh turned up at Air Park in Lincoln, Nebraska. Five-year-old Joshua Vinson Jr was crowned the winner of a pool-noodle competition open to anyone with the first name of Josh, while the original Josh Swain from Tucson won the right to keep his name via a heated game of rock, paper, scissors with Josh Swain from Omaha.

Of course, if you don't have the energy to organise a mass pool noodle fight, there are other ways to make the best of things.

Another time, when she was really fed up, she had the confirmation of a restaurant reservation go to her account. "I was like: 'Why did you make a reservation during Covid?' And so I cancelled the reservation. I felt terrible, but you know it was the height of Covid and I was like, 'Don't be going'."