Catch-all email accounts

[aerospaceweb]

I've been seeing strange behavior in incoming email and am wondering if anyone knows why. I do not have any catch-all email accounts and have very few email accounts or forwards in general. Those that do exist have fairly unusual names that should be difficult to guess.

Nevertheless, I'm seeing more and more spam emails getting through that appear to be sent to addresses that I have never created. For example, I keep getting emails addressed to an account called "advertising" that does not exist, yet they show up in my primary account. I tried sending a message to that address myself but it bounced back, as it should, since it is not a valid account.

Does anyone have any idea how these spams are getting through?

[briank]

Email, like a business letter, has zero or more "inside" addresses and one or more "envelope" addresses. The "inside" addresses are what you see in your mail client (and can be totally contrived), but the "envelope" addresses are what get used for delivery.

If you "blind carbon copy" (bcc) someone, you are adding an envelope address without adding an inside address.

The envelope address is typically the only part that gets changed during forwarding, so you will still see the original recipient on the inside address when you read the message.