My Gmail setting has forever been set to send emails with just my Gmail address

Question

My Gmail setting has forever been set to send emails with just my Gmail address as the identifier, so it should not send out my account name (first or last name)... or so I thought!

Recently I got a reply from someone (to whom I had contacted for the first time and never disclosed my name) and they wrote my first name in their response (the "Dear xyz,"). How could this happen? Did they somehow hack my email to find out my name? (I was using Gmail app on iPad.)

After this happened, I checked my Gmail setting and the email I sent to him, and my name was not anywhere in it (the "To" and "From" sections just show my email address.)

This is so creepy. His email came from his company email address. Might their server have some special power to decode Gmail emails or something?

Explanation / Answer

There are a number of ways this can happen, but hacking your email account to find our your name really isn't one of them. That would be a ridiculous amount of work given the risk and the very small potential reward involved.

The most likely explanation also one of the most mundane possibilities: They already have your name associated with your email address. How? Who knows. You'd have to ask them. Perhaps they bought a marketing list that contained your name and email. Perhaps you're in their system from some previous interaction that you've forgotten. Perhaps they purchased another company, and you were in that company's system. Perhaps they subscribe to a service to which that can plug-in an email address, and it returns any public information from anywhere on the Internet that it can find about the owner of that email address. (These services do exist.)

The potential ways this could have happened are nearly endless, and almost none of them involve any sort of impropriety, so the bottom line is that I wouldn't worry about it.

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