Lately, I’ve been receiving e-mail that’s not addressed to me. Most of it is addressed to other people in my organization. Is something wrong with my e-mail program, or our servers? What should I do?
The reason these e-mail messages are confusing you is because you are either a secondary recipient on the message, or the message is spam.
The message may actually be addressed to you
When you send an e-mail, there are other ways to include recipients besides putting their e-mail addresses in the To: field. The CC: field is for Carbon Copy, and is used to copy a message to one or more people who are not the primary recipients. These people’s email addresses will not appear in the To: field, but they will still receive the message. If you’ve received an e-mail on which you’re not a primary recipient, you may still find your address listed if you look for the CC: field.
In addition to Carbon Copy, e-mail has another similar feature called Blind Carbon Copy that causes messages to appear as if they aren’t addressed to you. Blind Carbon Copy, or BCC, is a method of addressing an e-mail message that allows the sender to hide all of the recipients’ e-mail addresses. When you receive an e-mail via BCC, it most likely will not appear to be addressed to you at all, because you will not be able to see your e-mail address anywhere.
If you have received an e-mail whose content is relevant to you personally or professionally, but the message does not appear to be addressed to you, you may be included as a secondary recipient in either of the CC: or BCC: fields. If the e-mail address of the sender is one you know, then odds are that you actually are an intended recipient.
The message may be spam
An e-mail that does not appear to be addressed to you and whose content is either suspect or nonsensical may very well be spam. Spammers are constantly looking for new and different ways to confuse the recipients of their e-mail marketing campaigns in order to increase the likelyhood that you might read or even take action upon their messages.
One method for tricking readers into responding to spam messages is called spoofing. Spoofing is a process wherein a spammer masks the identities of the sender and/or the recipient of an e-mail message in order to bypass spam filters and trick the recipient. Some spoofed e-mails may contain completely fake e-mail addresses, while others may contain the addresses of real people that were harvested from the Internet. If spammers have the e-mail addresses of others in your organization, they may even go so far as to spoof the e-mail so that it appears to be either sent to you from a colleague or addressed to one of your colleagues.
If you’ve recieved suspcious e-mail whose content is suspect and whose recipient list doesn’t include your e-mail address, it’s probably safe to simply delete the message. If it really concerns you, forward the e-mail to your system administrator or Internet service provider. Your sysadmin will be able to tell you exactly what’s going on, and then adjust your spam filter to safeguard against similar messages in the future.
[tags]email,spam[/tags]
