Re: Odd Emails
Originally Posted by
Mups
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If someone has got into my address book like RS suggested, how would I tell?
If people told you they were receiving strange emails from you, that would be a clue. You are receiving the e-mails though, so I think it's going to be the sender's addresses that have been gathered.
However, it's so commonplace for the e-mail system to be infiltrated by baddies these days that I've now given up thinking about the ways addresses are harvested. Just be aware that address-gathering happens one way or another and delete, without a second thought, suspicious e-mails from senders pretending to be people you know. If messages don't look/feel right, they probably aren't.
I had a couple of e-mails supposedly from someone I know. There was nothing but a link in the body of the message. A quick look at the e-mail header revealed that message didn't come from them at all but from some country I can't now remember. Deleted the e-mails and that was that.
There are cases where your own e-mail address (not your entire contacts list) has been gathered. That's just because we send our e-mail addresses to so many places and they might get sold on or gathered one way or another. Then you can get messages from the e-mail gatherer who could pretend to be anyone.
The last one of this type I got was from Virgin Media saying they were unable to charge my account for this month and would I confirm the account details. The message was genuine-looking with a proper Virgin Media logo. Some might fall for that I suppose. A look at the e-mail header revealed the message had come from Brazil. Goodbye e-mail
I could ditch that e-mail address since it has fallen into bad hands but I'm not going to. Too much hassle would be involved in telling everyone the change of address. Receiving e-mails of this kind doesn't often happen anyway. Any new address might eventually get harvested too.