I'm even very forgiving of this. In America, I feel like every name has a few different variants, especially anything that had to be transliterated from another character set (even the German name Müller comes through sometimes as Mueller and sometimes as Muller). Because they're so often some Anglicized version of some foreign name, it's hard to have an intuition about the right way to spell many names - even something simple like Goldman vs. Goldmann, Green vs. Greene. I imagine that most people store a name in their brain as how they pronounce it, plus some hint about the spelling if they've been burned before ("Hmm... I remember there's a silent j in there somewhere, but where...").

Names are tough in our wonderful melting pot, but it's a small price to pay for having every kind of ethnic food available in all our major cities (and in many of our minor ones).

Well, in my case, my first name is fairly common, it just has a letter repeated that normally isn't. So, it's not some unusual, foreign name.

Well, even common names have many variants floating around, that's the point. I tend to cut people slack on things like names given that I can never remember how to spell things like commitment (two ms? two ts? both?!) without a spellchecker getting my back.

I'm glad to know I'm not the only one. My last name is not hard to pronounce but if you haven't seen it you can pick 3/4 ways to spell it...but if I've worked with you for years and my email is firstinitial.lastname@ it drives me kind of crazy when I see people misspelling it.

My first name get misspelled more commonly than it's spelled correctly. I don't mind that so much from a personal relationships standpoint (it's not an intuitive spelling), but it's caused me real issues. The pharmacy had my name misspelled such that I couldn't fill proscriptions and it was really hard to fix. My ISP spelled it wrong when creating my account. The list goes on. And my name even has the "standard" spelling; I can't imagine what happens to people who don't.

Americans usually can't pronounce my name when they read it, they can't spell my name when they hear it, and they predict the opposite gender. Interestingly, Brits, even though they speak the same language, usually get everything right.

My name is Thomson, and I've set up the following aliases for my gmail (in decreasing order of traffic): thompson, thomas, tom, thom (my dad's name). I get an e-mail at least twice a week.

What gets me is when someone misspells my name in email. When my name, spelled correctly, is sitting there in the To: header.