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Last Updated: 08-Jan-2007 |
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Undelivered Emails Sometimes an email will be returned for a genuine reason, typically because either the email address simply no longer exists; or because you've mis-typed the address. The former can happen if your correspondent has not informed you that his/her email address has changed, and if so you'll just have to get in touch with him/her some other way; or maybe he/she has made a mistake in the email address supplied. Mis-typed email addresses can be the result of a simple typing error, or because the syntax of the email address is wrong; email addresses are very reliant upon the correct syntax, sometimes even being case-sensitive. Please check the address. Undelivered Emails You Never Sent I have received very many returned emails that I have never sent in the first place; but this is a sad and sorry fact of email today. Once your email address is compromised, there's nothing you can do but suffer the problem until the world's ISPs get to grips with the problem of spam generally. What's more even if you change your email address, you can still expect the new one to become compromised in very short order. The main cause of the problem is the very fact that emails are by definition sent to other people's computers; and you have no control over what internet security - if any - they have installed on their computers, and neither can you influence their internet "habits" (the sites they visit, downloads they make, etc.) All of which means that your email address on their computer is liable to be "harvested" by robotic spyware, Trojans, viruses and other obnoxious "malware". Your email address will be on their computer once you send them even a single email; and from then on you're vulnerable. One of the main examples of bad practice if for a person to send an email to several addressees "in clear" (whether they know each other or not) - i.e. everyone's included in the Send To or the CC list, and this guarantees that every recipient will have every other email address included in the email received and now stored on his/her computer. And it takes only one of these recipients to have an infected computer for all the email addresses to be harvested and compromised. An even worse offence is when an original email to multiple recipients sent as above, is then forwarded by one or more of them in turn, to several others in his/her address book, and so on. I have received several such well-intentioned emails, typically jokes or hoaxes, but it means that were my computer to be infected, all the people in the multi-forwarded email, most of whom are complete strangers to me, will have their email addresses compromised When sending email to several people it is best practice to send it to yourself, and list the other addresses in the "Bcc" area, i.e. using the "blind copy" facility. Thus each recipient will only receive your email address and his/hers, and none of the others. Note that in Outlook Express, the "Bcc" option is not displayed until after you click on the "cc" button - don't ask me why! Why harvest email addresses? There are two main reasons: Either to send you loads of spam; or secondly, to use your address as the ostensible sending address for mass-mailing spam to other email addresses, genuine or not. They need to do this as their own email addresses may well already have been blacklisted in global anti-spam databases, or in fact, to avoid being blacklisted. Their computers will often use your email address as given, but have have been known to generate new email "aliases"; thus the "domain" part of the sending email address would be correct, but the element in front of the "@" sign would be computer-generated. Thus cxyv@pc-firstaid.com has been used, as has ghjktyu@robin-beck.com. Emails so sent and undelivered are then returned to my domain since my email service is set up to collect all emails whatever the alias. I have to do this to prevent against genuine "malformed" email addresses, such as someone sending to suport@pc-firstaid.com - note the mis-spelling of support! See also Hoax Emails on the left for details on how they affect this topic. |
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