Does this sound strange to you?

I work at a church and we use Google Mail for our church office email address. We have a large number of people in our contacts, most of whom are either members or regular attenders, although there are a few vendors mixed in.

Whenever I am entering a new contact, I always list their contact name as first name last name, which also helps when they email me because it doesn’t just show an email address, but rather their full name. And especially because some people have really odd email addresses and it would be difficult to memorize a bunch of random email addresses.

Tonight, after hours, I went on my work email account and had an email from a regular attender stating that his email was going to be changing and what the new email was going to be within a week’s time. He then put his name at the bottom of the message. But here’s the strange thing. It showed up in my email as a message from John Smith, and his name is nothing like John Smith.

Another person got a similar email, although I should point out that their email message was worded a bit differently. It would make sense for this person to also get an email since they keep a database of everyone’s contact information.

But I clearly had that person listed in my contact as, we’ll say, Fred Doe. So why would it be showing up as John Smith under the sender of the email instead of Fred Doe?

Has anybody else heard of this happening? I didn’t respond to the email because I was worried his email had somehow gotten hacked.