How does someone send me email with the wrong address? How do I get
emails with someone elses email address?

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Clarification of Question by phaleon-ga on 08 Aug 2004 17:51 PDT

I get spam emails. They come to me with the wrong address. I have
noticed this on various email systems. How does a spammer send email
to me which is addressed to someone elses email? Most of the time they
have the same domain address. Like hotmail.com or centurytel.net..
etcetra...

Hi there.

They are using the "BCC" feature commonly found in most email
programs.  It stands for "blind carbon copy" and will send a copy of
that message to all addresses in the BCC list (just like in the TO: or
CC: list), but will not show any of the BCC addresses.

So, you could send a message like:

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Subject: test BCC email
To: mary@foo.C0M
CC: bob@bar.C0M, marty@gee.C0M
BCC: phaleon@question.C0M

Test of the BCC Message
----

Everyone listed would get the message (mary, bob, marty, and phaleon),
but no one wouldn't know phaleon received a copy, and phaleon wouldn't
see his address anywhere.  This is because the BCC field is removed
before it is sent.

For more information, check out this explanation:
http://www.techsoup.org/howto/articlepage.cfm?ArticleId=262&topicid=5


--Joey

Searching strategy: BCC email

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Clarification of Answer by joey-ga on 08 Aug 2004 18:01 PDT

Pardon the grammar typo:

it should say ". . . but no one would know . . ."

Depending on your mail server, it's also possible that emails being
sent to bogus addresses at your domain are getting mistakenly
forwarded to you.  (For instance, if you're bob123@company.com, and
spam is sent to bob@company.com, it's possible that the mail server is
guessing on the intended address and redirecting those to you.)  I'd
say that's pretty unlikely, but it happened to me a few years back....
I, of course, was foolish enough to respond asking to be unsubscribed,
which is why my inbox is so full every day.