recieving someone elses email

[Bubbly Scot]

I have a gmail account and I've been getting mail intended for someone else. My account is "myname"@gmail.com and the mail I've been getting is for "myname"@chorus.net google help threw no solution to the problem, it just said I've been blind copied but the header shows it was sent to the chorus adress. I've tracked down the owner of the chorus account as there was a signature on the bottom of one email and I'm convinced it's not spam. Well, so far it's "Fwd's" emails of the joke kind that are passing between a small group of people.

Can anyone shed any light on why this occurred and how I can stop it. Not sure if it's connected but in the last five minutes I've had five spam emails land from unconnected accounts..this is four more than I've had in the last month!

 

[GeneralZod]

What you see in the headers of emails can be spoofed. It doesn't actually determine where it is delivered. If you don't see your address in the headers (using the "show original" drop down option) it means either you really were BCCed or it's spam. It's also possible the sender had a default domain of @gmail.com set-up and sent it to just "yourname" intending it to go to "yourname"@chorus.net.

Spammers open a direct ESMTP (enhanced simple mail transfer protocol) connection to the mail server of the recipient and supply a "RCPT TO" field with "you"@gmail.com, they can supply multiple RCPT TOs to spam multiple recipients at once. This is what the receiving mail server uses to decide who to deliver the email to. The spammer then can supply whatever Subject, From & To lines in the message header they feel like. It makes it look like you received an email intended for someone else.

 

[Bubbly Scot]

I have just about followed your explanation, thanks. I guess the way to stop it is to put a filter on stopping the "myname"@chorus.net from getting delivered to me?

I was pretty sure it was a genuine mistake because of the nature of the emails...but so far I'm up to 14 spam emails apparently intended for the chorus email which is really brassing me off as I have never had that many in all the time I've had the account. This includes one email from "paypal" with a clickable link asking me to check in and verify my account details. Been around the block enough times to know not to fall for that one, it's just all so annoying.

Thanks for your explanation, much appreciated.