a strange email

I got an email from a customer yesterday .The odd thing was that it was addressed to one of the neighbours.

When I looked at the sorce code I could see that it was addressed to this other establishment but was in fact delivered to me.

At first I thought it was not genuine but the content seemed real and so I answered giving the customer a quote and adding a PS asking him how he thought I had received his email that was addressed (in the headers) to another establishment.

There has been no answer (to the quote or to the supplementary question).

Has anyone an explanation for this (I can provide the source code -anonymised/minus personal identifiers - if necessary)

 

Hello geordief

The only thing I can think of was that the sender made use of BCC (Blind Carbon Copy).

They put your e-mail address in the BCC field and the direct recipients (To) would not be able to see who was sent a copy via BCC.

I have moved your thread to Software as someone else may know what is going on and this does not sound malware related.

 

Thanks .Yes that would make sense to me.

I have to say I find that pretty underhand ( the sender didn't reply when I asked him to explain...)
.When emails first came to be used I remember I sometimes used to get a list of lots of other recipients (allowing you to ignore them for the most part) but BCC seems to allow the sender to address a business request to an unlimited amount of businesses each of which assumes the sender has made the effort to contact him personally.

You of course reciprocate and feel a fool when you realise you are just a number.

However I will be on my guard from now on.

 

thanks a lot for your answer.

Yes I did reply to the correct address and also got a reply requesting a quote (for accommodation) .

When I replied to that with the quote I also asked the person if they understood how it was that I got the email that showed another establishment as a recipient.

I thought I might have got an acknowledgement but not so.

In the past I have received spam emails purporting to come from all manner of addresses (including my own since I have a website that allows my email address to be harvested) and I generally just delete them but this was the first one over the past 10-15 years that looked genuine.

Now I understand better and I also appeciate that there can be good reasons to juggle the email addresses in the way you explained.

 

The e-mail system is not failsafe; emails can get misdirected, mislaid, mangled, delayed, returned, ..., ...

I have once received a highly classified email message from IBM to a customer, at a time when I was employed by a direct competitor of IBM. I am sure that the IBM salesman did not put my email address into the BCC list.

I will never know how that message got to me (I analyzed the headers, but found no clue), but I learned that email things can go wrong.

 

That is interesting.

When I was younger my mother was a telephonist (she had to physically connect phone conversations in the old fashioned way at the telephone exchange ) and she told me that one of her customers was Winston Churchill (well after the war).

I am sure she must have been tempted to eavesdrop (I think you had to listen into the first second or two to verify that both parties were communicating .)

Regarding my email I don't think it can have been mangled like yours may have been since the "other" address was so well known to me.