I receive email not addressed to me - virus?

Question

Every once in a while I receive email (on Gmail) that isn't addressed to me. Gmail puts it in the spam box, because it 'can't verify that it has been sent by [sender]'. The emails, when opened, contain confidential information about deliveries and paid bills (it does look an awful lot like 'real' mail from well-known companies, and it doesn't look like a scam, since the mail is informative - they give information instead of asking for credit card numbers ;-)), and I even got an email from "Facebook" that I requested a password change and that I have to 'click here' to change the password for [email address that isn't mine]. I am not the only addressee, there seems to be a whole list of Gmail addresses beginning with 'a'.

The original addressee obviously has some sort of virus, and now I wonder if this could be a risk for me too. Is my email being sent around without my knowing too? I am not the kind of person who randomly clicks on shady links - I am very careful on the internet - but maybe there are other ways of catching viruses? Is there something I should do/check?

Thank you for your help!

Answer 1

However genuine it looks, it's very likely spam generated by bots that try various alphanumeric combinations to generate email addresses to send email to.

Since Gmail says that the sender couldn't be verified for these emails, it's definitely spam generated by bots. The sender's address can easily be spoofed in emails, but there are a few mechanisms to verify if the sender is who it claims to be.

It seems like you're being BCCed on the emails, and so you don't see it as being addressed to your email address directly.