I'm getting emails not addressed to me

Question

Now this is driving me nuts. My hotmail account is getting emails that are not addressed to me. I know about the BCC field, but this doesn't appear to be that. Someone with the email address [email protected] sent out an invitation to a lot of people. Now those people are replying back to the invitation. These replies have [email protected] in To field (and no other email address in To or CC), but these replies still end up in my hotmail inbox.

The reason why I think this shouldn't be a BCC thing is that all the replying persons would not be adding my address in the BCC. Even if the admin had my address in the BCC field, that shouldn't appear in the reply.

I checked the mail source and there is no mention of my account anywhere. So what's going on here? I can of course mark that address as junk, but I'm more interested in knowing what's happening.

EDIT

Here is the source of one reply email. As you see, it is directed to [email protected] and not me. No other hotmail email address appears anywhere in the source.

Date: Wed, 27 Nov 2013 20:44:13 +0500
Subject: Re: Emotional Intelligence Workshop by Brig (R) Mowadat Hussain
 Rana in AFIC Rawalpindi
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Importance: normal
From: nuzhatsalamat <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="--_com.android.email_3151463546021830"
Precedence: list
Reply-To: [email protected]
Sender: [email protected]

----_com.android.email_3151463546021830
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

LOT OF BASE64 DATA HERE

----_com.android.email_3151463546021830
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

LOT OF BASE64 DATA HERE

----_com.android.email_3151463546021830--

Its probably impossible to answer this question on the information you have provided. We would need to get a copy of the email headers to even have a look-in, and even then, we don't know all your accounts and who you are, so its a long shot. — davidgo, Nov 27 '13 at 17:26
I think you're getting those emails because they're addressed to you, while in headers there are different "TO:" and "X-Rcpt-To:" and so on.. please, provide full headers of emails [you can get them by downloading the messages with outlook] ;) — AndreaCi, Nov 27 '13 at 17:44
This doesn't look like a reply to an invitation. It looks like **spam**. Spammers can connect to a mail-server and push mail into it with your e-mail as the destination address. This doesn't necessarily mean your address needs to be in the To-header. (That works with the same concept as the BCC where your address is also not in the headers). Also the fact the To-address **is the same** as the reply-to ([email protected]). That is not normal. Spammers use this method to circumvent spam-filters (and apparently that worked in this case ;( — Rik, Nov 27 '13 at 21:12

I'm getting emails not addressed to me

0 Answers0