I have received a E-mail and the ‘To:’ address is not mine

Question

I have just opened my Mail app on my phone and have noticed a strange email at the top of my mailbox.

I am from the UK and the sender of the strange e-mail was from a .de Address. I have no reason to be receiving mail from .de that I am aware of, but that isn't the reason for this question The recipient address IS NOT EVEN MY EMAIL ADDRESS!! I thought maybe they misspelled it but it is miles different from my email address… pics attached below.

Also i did NOT click any link within the email in case of potential harm to my phone or email account.

Answer 1

The email message format and protocol makes a distinction between:

1. The "envelope address" - the address stated in the SMTP interaction between the SMTP server (your email server) and the client (it may be other end-user device or another server).

The email is always delivered to the envelope address.

2. The "To" field in the message itself. It may, or may not be identical to the envelope address.

A legitimate reason for such a difference may be a mailing list or a mail redirection - mail is sent to e.g. "[email protected]" and the envelope address of this particular message may be e.g. "[email protected]"

The email server only cares about the envelope address, it is up to the client software to parse whatever is in the envelope and show it to the user.

Just like the usual post service, isn't it?

And then again, both these addresses, as well as the "From" field may contain a "real name" part - e.g. "John P. Smith <[email protected]>" The "real name" field is carried as-is and not checked against the email address (there is usually no possible mechanism for this check).

In some cases (and I am talking about You, Exchange server) the fields may not even contain the "email address" part, only the "real name" part.

Quite a few email programs show only the "real name" part of the "To" field inside the message. One may need to click or hover on the address to see the exact address (and in mobile setup it may be even harder).

And then, the frustrating part: Spammers, scammers and other internet junk people like to impersonate a legitimate correspondent by abusing the "real name" parts like this: "[email protected] <[email protected]>"

The spam-filtering software doesn't usually care about the "real name" part, even if it looks like an email address itself and the client email software happily shows the "real name" part even if it is completely misleading like the example above.

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In short, if you know what you are doing, you may list the message in "raw" format and see exactly what happened, but in most cases it is enough to chalk it as "spam/scam/honest-but-gross-misconfiguration" and simply delete the message for good.