Normally the mail we receive in our main Hotmail account will say something like this, when you open it:
But ever since Hotmail’s last “hey lookie us!” bells-n-whistles upgrade (insert one tiny rolleyes smilie here), I’ve been finding intercepted spam in the Junk mail box that looks like this:
You’ll notice that “irishiiize13 @ yahoo” bears absolutely no resemblance to “Bgoose @ hotmail”. So my question is, how does this stuff end up in our mailbox, if it isn’t addressed correctly? I thought an e-mail address had to be jot-and-tittle accurate, or else you get a “Mail undeliverable” message bounced back atcha.
It’s a very common technique (both for spam and for non-spam messages) for all the recipients to be BCC (blind carbon copy), so that each recipient cannot see a list of the other recipients.
As **Mangetout **and **Giles **already noted, there is nothing surprising about getting a mail that isn’t explicitly addressed to you – it means your address was put in the BCC field by the sender (probably in some kind of attempt to make the recipient (“to:”) field look legit and bypass spam filters. Doesn’t work :))
The question is whether you’re now getting suspected spam that you weren’t getting before (which may mean that hotmail doesn’t completely nuke some messages they did before, and gives you the option to decide if it’s “real” or not)
Addendum - they should more properly do it as “X-Envelope-To”, since it’s a non-standard informational header, and some mail software does this as well.
You can say that again. I recently had a change made to my domain hosting and in the shuffle, all spam controls were removed for a few days.
With the controls in place, I typically get 500 spams per day. WithOUT them, I got 36,000 per day. For all I know, my mailbox may have filled up repeatedly and prevented more from coming in.
Just think – spammers are still making money even though I have never responded, clicked on, or purchased anything from them in 10 years. And I’m probably typical of Internet users. So there must be a lot of dunderheads out there supporting these bastids in a royal manner.
The key point is that it costs practically nothing to mail the spam. Even a very, very low hit rate will pay them back. It’s far worse than postal direct mail, which shares some of the same features - even though most people toss junk mail in the waste basket, it’s such a cheap form of advertising that exceedingly low response rates will pay for it.
This is why imposing a small “postage fee” on email might solve the problem, irritating, technically problematic, and intrusive a solution as that is. I’m inclined to believe it would be a cure worse than the disease.
