How can I be receiving emails that are not addressed to me?
I have received about eight emails in rapid succession that all appear to be responses (they are autoresponses, except one, which is an angry screed against scammers). I did not receive the original email that they are responding to. This is even happening with replies to the replies, creating this sort of echo chamber.
The original subject is
Home Depot Special Promotion: Limited Time Discounts for Selected Products!
The recipients of the replies are
To: sales@wingate.com
support@jo.nextleveladventurezone.store
cc:
info@jo.saleelitezfondhost.cfd
My email address is not there. How am I receiving emails that were not addressed to me? If the original email had me on bcc then the recipients would not be able to reply to me. I am wondering if the original sender’s email, which they are responding to, is somehow doing a redirect to me. But I have never heard of a redirect at that level. And I can’t imagine why a scammer would set up mail forwarding to me, and I’m not sure that the emails and header would even look like this if they were being forwarded.
That would explain what is happening technically, but it makes no sense for them to be forwarded to me, unless someone were trying to harass me. I have gotten emails that responded to spam that spoofed my email address, but this is different.
Does the OP have an old forgotten email address that may have been left on auto-forward to their current email, the one receiving the mystery spam responses? From a former job or school perhaps? Or from the early days of AOL, yahoo, etc.?
I don’t have a clue what I ever did to davidgreen67@gmail but I have been getting his forwards for years. I have messaged him a few times but he hasn’t replied so I just keep unsubscribing us.
In my experience, a BCC just obscures other recipients, not you as the recipient in the header. It just looks like it was sent to you alone when there were other recipients.
I deal with a lot of these. Its to get through your spam filter.
If they JUST sent you the spam message, your filter would delete the e-mail. Since the spam is on top of a bunch of replies, it brings the spam down to the level that your spam filter thinks its real.
You know, you’re right. I just tested it between a few of my personal email addresses. If I send an email from address A to addresses B and C via BCC, the email shows up looking like address A sent an email to itself and I got it somehow. If I send an email from address A to address B, and BCC address C, then it arrives to both recipients showing only address B as the recipient.
So that would certainly explain how they are doing it. BCC would definitely accomplish this. As to why you would use this method, it might help obfuscate the email enough to frustrate spam filters. Both hiding the true recipient and hiding the true number of recipients might get past certain rules a system might have.
That could be but if someone replied to the spam, even if they Reply All, it would not come to me. If I’m on bcc that recipient would never see my email address.
Secureserver is a GoDaddy email host. Somebody probably added you to some spam self-hosted mailing list that BCCs everyone and when they reply to pr+bncBDYJDKPYXMMRBBN377BQMGQEVAMKBEI@jo.saleelitezfondhost.cfd they send it to that mailing list and the server then sends all the replies to everyone on it, via BCC.
Just mark it as spam and move on… there are a billion ways they can do this, none of which are really worth your time to worry about too much.
If it were not for the other recipients, my guess would be that a spammer spoofed your e-mail address as the From: address i.e. the replies to the spam mail arrive at your address because the spam mail purports to be sent from your address.
I have had that happen before (and I have been blacklisted as a result). When the angry recipient does reply to me (most people by now have figured that it’s pointless to reply to spam) the email sent to me has my address in the To: field. That is not the case here.
That’s a new one on me, but it does fit what I’m seeing. The GoDaddy server is actually my own mail server (I have my own domain name, DNS, and mail hosted by GoDaddy) and the header shows that the server sent the mail to my desktop Outlook client. I didn’t try to analyze the header much but now that you’ve pointed it out the address you showed above is, which I suppose is the Reply-To address, is different than the From address. It would make sense that it’s a unique ID for a mailing list and sends any incoming emails right back out to the list on BCC.