Got an out of office reply to an email I did not send

Brendan Burgess

Founder
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54,685
I got an out of office reply today from a person I have not emailed in some weeks. My first thought was that my email account had been hacked.

I thought I might get a raft of emails or calls from people telling me I had sent them spam emails.

But then someone else told me tonight that they got an out of office reply from someone they had not emailed in 5 years.

Is there some new virus doing the rounds?
 
Most likely it is someone sending spam email, and spoofing the 'from' address to your email address. It's pretty common, and impossible to stop.

If all spam came from a small number of email addresses, or only compromised mailboxes, it'd be much easier identify and block. The spammers know this, and cycle through huge volumes of email addresses to place in the from field to bypass spam filters.
 
Hi Leo

Possibly, but it was an out of office reply? There was no spam involved.

I actually got two from him at the same time to two separate email addresses.

I have emailed the sender to notify him.

Brendan
 
Something similar happened to me several months back when I received acknowledgement emails from the Probate Office. I hadn't emailed them in years.

Turned out the problem was at their end.

It is quite possible that the issue here may be with the other person's account rather than yours. The fact that u got two to different email addresses would suggest this

If he confirms that other people contacted him about the same thing that should confirm it
 
I think I encountered this problem some years ago in work when I set my out of office. Because there was a problem with the out of office option it set the leaving date a few years back and everyone on my sender's list got an out office notification from me. It could correspond with the bank holiday week-end.
 
Brendan Burgess said:
Hi Leo

Possibly, but it was an out of office reply? There was no spam involved.

I actually got two from him at the same time to two separate email addresses.

I have emailed the sender to notify him.

Brendan
Click to expand...

This often happens during holidays. They sent the spam to someone using your email address in the 'from' tag and that person had an out of office message set up. So you got a genuine reply.
 
I think some email clients, eg Lotus Notes, hasve a setting that when you set up an out of office, it will notify your contacts.
So if you are in regular contact with this person and you are in their contact list, they may have done this deliberatally.
If you dont know the person, its possible your email address was used to send spam
 
Jim2007 said:
This often happens during holidays. They sent the spam to someone using your email address in the 'from' tag and that person had an out of office message set up. So you got a genuine reply.
Click to expand...

Hi Jim

That sounds a possible explanation. Can I clarify my understanding of it.

1) Someone spammed Johnny using my email address
2) Johnny had set up an out of office on his email
3) It sent me an out of office reply

Brendan
 
Brendan Burgess said:
Hi Jim

That sounds a possible explanation. Can I clarify my understanding of it.

1) Someone spammed Johnny using my email address
2) Johnny had set up an out of office on his email
3) It sent me an out of office reply

Brendan
Click to expand...

Got it!
 

I've seen this before. Someone sets a date in the past for out of office and if you sent them a mail over that period you now get an out of office reply.
 
It may be a problem with the date. This is the message I got on 18 April, to an email I did not send

I will be out of the office starting Wed 02/05/2014 and will not return until Tue 05/06/2014.
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I don't know if the 02/05 is 2nd of May or the 5th of February.

Brendan
 
DerKaiser said:
I've seen this before. Someone sets a date in the past for out of office and if you sent them a mail over that period you now get an out of office reply.
Click to expand...

Because so many people were slagging me about setting the date incorrectly, I checked it and found that I hadn't done so. Contacted I.T. and they confirmed that it was an intermittent problem that they were having with Lotus Notes at that time.
 
Brendan Burgess said:
It may be a problem with the date. This is the message I got on 18 April, to an email I did not send



I don't know if the 02/05 is 2nd of May or the 5th of February.

Brendan
Click to expand...

I'd guess the recipient of the spam is in the US, so 02/05 corresponds to the 5th of February
 
Brendan Burgess said:
It may be a problem with the date. This is the message I got on 18 April, to an email I did not send

I don't know if the 02/05 is 2nd of May or the 5th of February.

Brendan
Click to expand...

The message is set by the user when they set up the out-of-office auto-reply. The contents of that message are just free-form text, and have no bearing on the operation of the out-of-office functionality.

So a spammer sent an email to this person with your address in the from field. The person had their out-of-office active at the time, and you got the response. Getting two responses to two different email addresses suggests the spammers sent emails using both addresses.
 
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