Odd emails

Twice recently, I have had emails from friends - two entirely different people - and although their name shows on the incoming email, it has not been from their email address. In fact the most recent one was a peculiar foreign looking email address. Both had links attached.

I have deleted them of course, but what does this mean exactly? Does it mean someone has hacked my friends address books, or hacked mine, or neither?
Where have these weirdo's got my address from?

Your thoughts would be most welcome. Thanks.

Re: Odd emails

I get threatening/blackmailing emails from myself, they're just spoofing the from address. Just delete them and forget it.

Re: Odd emails

If an email get infected then people in that address book could have the infection passed on to them. Then the same again in that address book and so it gets passed from one to another.

AS always if you do not recognise anything then just delete it

Re: Odd emails

I had a couple of those recently after using an online breakers yard site. I looked it into it a bit more and found that they originated from a mosque.

Re: Odd emails

Good grief dongle, that's really weird.
Are you serious?

Re: Odd emails

Sounds like your friends email addresses have been hacked mups. You did the right thing deleting them without opening the links. If you can let your friends know they need to change passwords urgently and sweep their computers for the bugs.

Re: Odd emails

Yes, that is what I was concerned about too Julie.
I have told both people so they can deal with it their end.
Thanks.

Re: Odd emails

You will often find that family and friends are computer illiterate and don't exercise much caution when using email and web browsing.

What such people tend to do is send out emails (often useless frivolous crap like say links to videos of cats and dogs and so on) and they just blanket email all their family and /or friends in one go.

Doing so they put ALL the email addresses in the "Send To" or "cc" part of the email which means everyone who receives the email can see the email addresses of everyone else the email was sent to.

That, imo, is very bad practice. Only takes one person on that list to get a virus on their PC through lack of caution and ability and that virus logs ALL the email addresses it can see in that persons email inbox. Hence it grabs YOUR email address along with everyone else's and then you become the target for future virus attacks.

What people should do is put all the email recipients addressed in the BCC part of the email not the CC.

Then you don't get to see who else has been emailed, you just get the email yourself. This keeps everyone safer.

I've previously had to write some very stern emails to a couple of aunts who repeated didn't take this seriously and ended up causing lots of grief to the rest of the family who were receiving all sorts of spam and phishing emails. All because they wouldn't exercise a little discipline to use the BCC box in emails.