Let’s get the obvious joke out of the way first — yes, someone out there still uses hotmail. Moving on… Something strange is happening this afternoon. People who click on the top Google search result for “Gmail” are automatically starting draft e-mails to some unfortunate hotmail user.

We first heard about it on Techcrunch then tried it for ourselves, and indeed, as of 4:07 p.m. ET today, when we Googled the term “Gmail,” then clicked on the “Email” link, it opened a new tab with this unfortunate soul’s e-mail address already in the “To” line.

You can try it for yourself, but please don’t actually send any more messages to the guy. Even though it’s now a matter of public record, we’re blocking out the full e-mail address above just because we don’t want someone digging this story up three years from now and sending e-mails to this guy (though we hope he will have long-ditched this particular address by that point).

“I’ve been getting thousands of no-subject, blank emails,” he tells Techcrunch. “500 of them come every hour, I can’t stop them.”

This apparently all began on Thursday, so it seems unlikely that the issue is tied to today’s Gmail outage. However, that brief outage had plenty of people Googling “Gmail” and clicking on that link.

“They’re coming so fast, I want to stop them. I deleted everything last night and woke up this morning and had 1,900 new emails” he says about the deluge. “Only two of them were emails I cared about.”

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