Why am I receiving emails addressed to a different person?

[MmeLindor.]

The other thread just reminded me that I have been meaning to ask this.

Both DH and I have ancient yahoo email accounts that we very rarely use but have not cancelled. I have them set up that they are forwarded to my outlook.

Recently there has been a marked increase in spam. I noticed that the emails are not addressed to us, but to similar names

eg. instead of mmelindor at yahoo.de

mmlindor at yahoo.de

or mmlindora at yahoo.de

I have a spam guard on both yahoo and on outlook so it is not serious but it is annoying. Sometimes I have 10 spam mails a day.

[OberonTheHopeful]

The most likely explanation is that your email address is hidden in a BCC field. Spammers use this a lot. The TO field contains an address that has been guessed at, and then the BCC field contains variations in the hope that one of them is a real email address.

[NetworkGuy]

agreed, they probably place 20 to 200 additional mail addresses in BCC and once a mail address has been listed in one spmmers pile, it could be sold on to another spammer too. I have a number of old mail addresses and now just send everything on to GMail, which does a fairly good job of identifying the rubbish for me.

[MmeLindor.]

oh, that makes sense. Seems that Yahoo filters are shite.

Funnily enough, I also have a .com yahoo account and it is fine. Just the .de accounts.

[NetworkGuy]

Been a long time since i used my Yahoo! mail. In the UK, I think a deal was done and BT Broadband seem to have been a Yahoo! partner and may charge for use...

Anyway I managed to set up forwarding to my GMail account that deals with spam more reliably :)

Do not remember last time I logged into the Yahoo! account so it might die (no big deal for me, just minor problem for any spammers).