Who the heck is this guy with my name and a gmail account?

If you read my earlier posting about moving to Verizon, you read that I’m soon abandoning my comcast email addresses.  Now is a good opportunity to streamline my various email accounts.  Contrary to popular misconceptions, I don’t believe in having a 101 email accounts — who wants to check them all?  A while back, I got rid of my long-standing (since 1999) hotmail account (ah, grandma_funk76, I still miss thee.)

My sumo_joel Yahoo! account is tied to my Flickr account and Facebook, but it gets more SPAM than I should have to endure.  I’m debating what to do with the Yahoo! account. Can I even switch the email address associated with Facebook?

I’ll probably use one of the default Verizon mail accounts for business purposes (bills and stuff, and you get 9 accounts.)  What should I do for personal?  Everyone but my mother has a Gmail account, so I looked into that.  Gmail seems interesting, but I would use IMAP to synch my email with my BlackBerry and my Outlook on the home desktop. 

I tried signing up for a gmail account, and guess what?  Some jerk has already taken joelipe@gmail.com, and joel.ipe@gmail.com.  Can you believe that?  Who has my exact name, in two different formats?  I’m absolutely shocked!  I have half a mind to write these two guys, because inquiring minds want to know.  My wife jokes that the accounts may belong to a “Joe Lipe” or even a “Jo Elipe” (a chick?)

I’m befuddled.  I also don’t have a potential email account for personal use. I considered even setting up some using my joelipe.com domain.  Some options I have considered are joel @ joelipe.com, me @ joelipe.com, YouGoGirl@joelipe.com, and even StrongPimpHand@joelipe.com.

Any suggestions?