[OFB Cafe] Need Help / Advise

Fri Mar 6 12:58:38 CST 2009

Email messages have what's called an "envelope recipient" that's
different than the recipient specified on the to line. They also have
an "envelope sender" that's different than the from line. Imagine a
printed letter that is sent via the postal mail;  the letter may being
"Dear Aunt Doris" and end "Sincerely Don", but that's not what the
post office looks at when they're delivering it or handling a "bounce"
if the letter is returned for insufficient postage or something.
Email systems are the same way; The To: and From: that your email
client displays are purely cosmetic.  They may often be the same as
the envelope addresses, but there's nothing stopping you from stuffing
your letter to aunt Doris in the envelope to be sent to the electric
company.

Now that that's out of the way, there are a couple reasons that the
envelope recipient (you or your daughter-in-law) could be getting mail
with the message recipient displayed as your daughter:

1)  your daughter set up a mail rule to automatically forward messages
to the two of you. Most systems that process mail forwards won't
re-write the message recipient when they re-write the envelope
recipient and re-process the mail.

2) You're being BCC'ed on the messages, which simply means that your
name is ending up in the list of envelope recipients and not the list
of message recipients.

3) someone is putting your name in the envelope recipient name and
your daughter's name in the message recipient name. No normal mail
client does this, so they're either crafting the messages by hand, or
using some specialized software to do it.  Spamming software offers
this feature, as do most programming APIs that deal with mail.

The best way to tell would be to look at the message headers. (View ->
Message source) in Thunderbird. The recieved headers show you the path
the mail took to get to you.  They're not always in the right order,
but they have timestamps and all basically follow the same format.
They look like this:

Check to see if the message ever touches a time warner or roadrunner
server.  If it does, your daughter set up a mail forward somehow. If
it doesn't, either your being BCC'ed on the messages, or someone is
playing tricks on you.

-Fred

On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 1:28 PM, Donald Spoon <drspoon at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> I have a problem with my EMail that has apparently cropped up in the last
> few days.  Maybe some of the GURUS here can help get me going in the right
> direction.
> I have been getting EMails addressed to my daughter in my EMail "inbox".
>  She is lives in another house here in San Antonio, and is using Road Runner
> from Time Warner.  I am using the AT&T DSL system which is basically run by
> Yahoo.  To add to the mystery, my other Daughter-in-law in Alexandria VA,
> who is using GMAIL is getting the same thing, i.e. messages addressed to my
> daughter.
>
> Does anybody have an explanation on how this happens and how to prevent it?
>  I am particularly interested in who's servers are "at fault".  How does
> GMAIL and YAHOO think an address to a ROADRUNNER account is legit and
> accepts it?  I routinely get EMails bounced when I misspell just ONE letter
> in a address.  In this case the entire address is wrong and it get through
> to me!
>
> -Don Spoon-
>
>
>
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