Undeliverable Emails & Why You Get Them

We've received many inquiries lately as to why you might receive an undeliverable email for something you've never sent. The email might look like the one below:

From: System Administrator
Sent: Thursday, April 17, 2008 10:07 AM
To: Vince Tinnirello
Subject: Undeliverable: Replica watches

Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients.
Subject: Replica watches
Sent: 4/17/2008 8:17 AM
The following recipient(s) could not be reached:
h@mmi.com.sg on 4/17/2008 10:04 AM
The e-mail account does not exist at the organization this message was sent to. Check the e-mail address, or contact the recipient directly to find out the correct address.
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What's most often happening is this: Either a spammer or a virus has gotten it's a hold of your email address, and is forging it into the 'From' section of the email they are sending. In the 'To' section, it is putting other email addresses it knows. Not all of the 'To' addresses are valid, since people do occasionally change email addresses. Thus, these invalid ones get returned to you, even though you didn't send the email in the first place. How do spammers get your email address? Most often not from you, but from someone you've sent email to. It could be that someone you've sent email to has a virus, or in other cases it may come from your website if you have email addresses listed there. Many spammers use tools that gather emails off of websites in the "contact us" section to use. So if you have "info@" or "sales@" forwarding to your mailbox, this is the probably the culprit.

What can we do about it? Unfortunately there is nothing that can be done to stop this from happening. Using an email security tool like ExchangeDefender will reduce the number of these you see, but it can't prevent it 100%. I'd also recommend not putting individual emails such as "vince@" on your website to further reduce the risk. For the rest that come through, your best bet is just to delete them and move on with your day. I hope this was helpful and please let us know if you have any questions!