I received two e-mails. One was from a friend, and the other was a promotion from a company I buy things from. When I opened the company’s e-mail I got the expected pitch for their product. But when I opened my friend’s e-mail I got the same thing, with no message from my friend.
How can this happen?
your friend owns the company. ask for a discount.
what email do you use? it might have corrupted data or malfunctioned.
assuming the company is nonspamming.
They are both Spam e-mails. Your friend never sent you an e-mail at all. This is known as e-mail spoofing and is very easy to do because the e-mail standard isn’t secure at all. It is simple to send an e-mail from anyone to anyone without it being obvious unless you look at the detailed e-mail headers which aren’t normally shown. The Spammer got access to your address book or your friend’s maybe through malware or a virus and built a list of people you know and used that to send Spam to you under your friend’s name in the hopes that you would be more likely to open it. Apparently, they targeted you twice in a short time under two different names.
No, neither was spam. I was expecting an e-mail from my friend, and the “subject” was appropriate with what should have been the content. And the company’s e-mail was about a promotion that I already knew about.
And when I click on my friend’s e-mail it immediately goes to the other message. Even the “from” address gives the company, not my friend . . . but this only happens when I’ve opened his message. Before opening, everything looks normal.
Do you by chance use Thunderbird as your e-mail client? Recent versions of Thunderbird have been exhibiting this behavior for me; to date, restarting it has cleared things up each time.
My e-mail is with AT%T Yahoo Small Business.
Corruption in your email client’s mail database.
But what program do you use to access your account?
Firefox 3.6.11
OK, so it’s web-based email? You access a web page and interact with buttons and forms on a web page to read and manage your email, like with GMail and Hotmail?
OK, if that’s the case, then it isn’t anything at your end; your browser doesn’t exert enough control over what happens regarding your email account to cause the problems you saw.
That means you can’t fix it. Only AT&T Yahoo Small Business can. Sorry.