Address Resolutions?

[moldyoldie]

Almost daily I get emails to addresses other my own! When I view the full header it says the address was resolved to and delivered to my address!

Absolutely the ONLY similarity I can see is the first letter is the same.

Any idea of a way I can stop receiving emails addressed to someone else?

Thanks!

[robert@fm]

If you receive an email to an address similar to, but not the same as, your own, at least 9 times out of 10 it's an "address-probe spam" — people (for the most part) now know not to reply to obvious spam, either directly or by clicking on a so-called "unsubscribe" link, as doing so confirms their address as active and hence brings more spam; hence the address-probe, which uses cunning social engineering to trick you into replying ("sorry, wrong address").

I've reported all of the "mis-addressed" emails I've received over the last year to SpamCop, and all have proved to have been sent through open relays — proving them to be spam.

One needs to be ever more careful these days...

Originally posted by moldyoldie
Any idea of a way I can stop receiving emails addressed to someone else?

You can't do this without blocking all mail BCCed to you.

[moldyoldie]

robert and Daniel,

Thanks for the response. Amazing that one letter in common gets sent to my address! But I understand what you are saying ... still boggles my mind that something like srycomATfastmail.fm will get delivered to sshaffarATfastmail.fm...

Also, Daniel ... these have no cc's or bcc's according to the full hearder info. But then again I guess it wouldn't be considered a "blind" copy if you could see it, huh?

Again, thank you both for responding.

[Admin: I've hidden your email addresses for you so that they can't get harvested by spambots.]

Originally posted by moldyoldie
Also, Daniel ... these have no cc's or bcc's according to the full hearder info. But then again I guess it wouldn't be considered a "blind" copy if you could see it, huh?

Exactly. SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) allows actual (envelope) recipient addresses to be completely different from the addresses in the headers; this is what allows BCCs to work.

If you're curious, see this example SMTP session (a blank line to separate the headers from the body is missing).

BTW, you should edit the email addresses in your post to something like usernameATdomainDOTtld; otherwise, they may be harvested and used by spammers.

[ROBERT.BAK]

Originally posted by Daniel S
You can't do this without blocking all mail BCCed to you.

I've heard of some twits^Wpeople who do exactly that, for spam-fighting reasons...

[ROBERT.BAK]

Originally posted by moldyoldie
Also, Daniel ... these have no cc's or bcc's according to the full hearder info. But then again I guess it wouldn't be considered a "blind" copy if you could see it, huh?

Although BCC is often mis-described as a "header", it isn't; it's just a field used (along with "To" and "CC") in constructing the SMTP Envelope (which is what's actually used to deliver the email; the headers don't necessarily mean anything).

Spammers usually construct the SMTP Envelope directly, and also give the mail bogus "headers" in an attempt to throw people off the track.

[moldyoldie]

Thanks to all of you for responding, I've certainly learned a lot and I truly appreciate your time and explanations.

[robmueller]

Check this FAQ entry for more details as well:

http://www.fastmail.fm/docs/faqparts...htm#EmailForge

So what's happening is the email is addressed to you in the SMTP envelope, but the actual header has rubbish in it. That'll make sense after you've read the above link.

Rob