Comments for Why do I get spam that's not addressed to me?

Comment from alpha omega on 2009-06-22

2009-06-22T14:32:07Z

I'm confused. The answer does not match my experience. When I get one of these spam messages...there is nothing in the headers to indicate that the message is meant for my account. However, when people BCC me...there are headers in the message to indicate that the message is meant for my account. So I still do not understand how I keep getting spam email in my account when no header in the message indicates that it is for my account?

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Comment from John Neeting on 2009-01-11

2009-01-11T13:47:36Z

When I first used hotmail, I got hundreds of spam,phishing, and plain con e-mails [ including money scams ] then I loaded the ACMA submission page in my favorites.Every time I got crap - I passed the whole page to ACMA [ located in Canberra ] Their job is to track these scum, arrest them and prosecute. It's been over a year now and I don't get any spam EVER!!!. And I don't even run any anti-spam programs; I guess when the federal police start knocking on doors, some people get the message :)

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Comment from Duane on 2008-12-20

2008-12-20T22:35:04Z

Not exactly the question raised here but perhaps a related issue....

Not so much recently but in the past I received numerous crap emails seemingly addressed *from* me. (If my email address is, for example, abc@xyz.com the email would not only be addressed *to* that address but *from* that same address.)

Concerned at first thinking someone was sending spam from my hijacked email address after some time I ceased being worried and simply figured the spam-sender's program somehow simply did this by design -- perhaps further enticing the recipient to open the email (after all, it was sent from me!).

BTW - Either HTML tags on these boards don't work for me or the effects of using them don't show in the "Preview" window. I'm not sure which.

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Comment from Ray on 2008-12-16

2008-12-17T06:48:14Z

I have to agree with the above; I'm not sure the question was answered. I know of a couple of reasons that might produce the situation described, for instance, if the e-mail recipient happens to own the domain and their e-mail address is the "catch all" address for the domain.

Also, spammers can fake most of the header information in their e-mails. I'd advise the questioner to check the "Envelope-to:" and "To:" lines in the e-mail's header.

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Comment from Sergio Romero on 2008-12-16

2008-12-16T20:41:48Z

Although everything that was discussed is very interesting, I don't believe that the question was answered.

I don't claim to know the exact answer to the question but, for example, I do know that gmail has this feature that if your email address is:

myEmail@gmail.com

you might type my.Email@gmail.com and for gmail both addresses are the same one. It can even go as far as being myEmail+someSite@gmail.com and gmail will still consider it to be the same address which is usefull since if one day you receive an email from an unknown source with this email address, you'll know that "someSite" sold its emails database.

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A comment on: Why do I get spam that's not addressed to me?

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