Email Questions.

[Guiseppe]

I use SMM to check my emails on the email server. There have been a couple of instances where I have received emails that are addressed to "somebody" completely different i.e. the email address bears no resemblance to mine.

I rang my ISP and was told, " .. just spam .. " and " .. just delete it without opening it ...". Additional discussion did not produce anything further.

To my mind that is not good enough. Now for the questions.

1. How is it possible that I can receive emails with an address that no way resembles mine? Comment - the first 4 letters of the address were the same as mine, all the rest no relationship at all.

2. If it is possible for me to receive someone else's email then presumably then it is possible for other people to receive mine?

3. If the answer to 2# is yes then is it possible to ensure only the person, to whom the email is addressed, actually receives it?

[beer4life]

I use SMM to check my emails on the email server. There have been a couple of instances where I have received emails that are addressed to "somebody" completely different i.e. the email address bears no resemblance to mine.

I rang my ISP and was told, " .. just spam .. " and " .. just delete it without opening it ...". Additional discussion did not produce anything further.

To my mind that is not good enough. Now for the questions.

1. How is it possible that I can receive emails with an address that no way resembles mine? Comment - the first 4 letters of the address were the same as mine, all the rest no relationship at all.

2. If it is possible for me to receive someone else's email then presumably then it is possible for other people to receive mine?

3. If the answer to 2# is yes then is it possible to ensure only the person, to whom the email is addressed, actually receives it?

G'Day Cobber,
don't feel that you are alone with these parasites.
Possibly the worst thing to do is to try and unsubscribe. They then know they've hit a jackpot.
Many Tips here how to circumvent this abomination.



An opening paragraph from extensive defences.

How do spammers harvest email addresses ?

By Uri Raz

There are many ways in which spammers can get your email address. The ones I know of are :

1. From posts to UseNet with your email address.
   Spammers regularily scan UseNet for email address, using ready made programs designed to do so. Some programs just look at articles headers which contain email address (From:, Reply-To:, etc), while other programs check the articles' bodies, starting with programs that look at signatures, through programs that take everything that contain a '@' character and attempt to demunge munged email addresses.
   There have been reports of spammers demunging email addresses on occasions, ranging from demunging a single address for purposes of revenge spamming to automatic methods that try to unmunge email addresses that were munged in some common ways, e.g. remove such strings as 'nospam' from email addresses.
   As people who where spammed frequently report that spam frequency to their mailbox dropped sharply after a period in which they did not post to UseNet, as well as evidence to spammers' chase after 'fresh' and 'live' addresses, this technique seems to be the primary source of email addresses for spammers.
2. From mailing lists.
   Spammers regularily attempt to get the lists of subscribers to mailing lists [some mail servers will give those upon request],knowing that the email addresses are unmunged and that only a few of the addresses are invalid...............

Yes, I need to employ some of the defences myself.
Kindest Regards, " The Druid ".

[Joey]

I use SMM to check my emails on the email server. There have been a couple of instances where I have received emails that are addressed to "somebody" completely different i.e. the email address bears no resemblance to mine.

I rang my ISP and was told, " .. just spam .. " and " .. just delete it without opening it ...". Additional discussion did not produce anything further.

To my mind that is not good enough. Now for the questions.

1. How is it possible that I can receive emails with an address that no way resembles mine? Comment - the first 4 letters of the address were the same as mine, all the rest no relationship at all.

2. If it is possible for me to receive someone else's email then presumably then it is possible for other people to receive mine?

3. If the answer to 2# is yes then is it possible to ensure only the person, to whom the email is addressed, actually receives it?

You don't need to worry about other people getting your mail , any spam like you describe that you have received means it was BCC'd to you , the addresses you can see that are someone else's are addresses that were CC'd , meaning the mail gets to you but you can't see your own address.

The from and too fields can be forged to be anything ,but your real email address will either be visible in the header or you were BCC'd, you are probably one of many thousands getting the same spam at the same time.

Another cause of this is bad business practices still used by some irresponsible ISP's were they have a catchall enabled , for example if you were with mail.com , all the spammer does is send mail to every possible combinations of @mail.com , even though 4000 of them may not exist it still gets delivered to address that do exist that they happen to guess.

Responsible ISP's know that it is very rare for one person to need to send mail to every user or 100's of users at the same ISP meaning it must be spam , so they deny it.

[Guiseppe]

beer4life,

Your link has very interesting reading. I guessed that I had been BCCd.

Joey,

I am pleased to see your comment regarding my emails not going to other people.