Emails being sent unknown to me, not in Sent folder
Hi all,
I have an issue whereby emails are being sent to my clients repeatedly, without me sending them. This happens daily in the morning, and is incredibly frustrating and difficult to diagnose as the emails do not show in the Sent folder.
Clients reply on the email stating they receive the email/invoice every day. I can't contact clients to let them know to disregard the email, as I do not know who is affected. The only temporary fix I have found is removing their email address from my address book.
I have inspected the replied email, and I do not see anything out of the ordinary like changes in bank details, so it does not look like a email spoofing. I am wondering if this is not an issue with Thunderbird on my windows PC.
I am going to uninstall and reinstall Thunderbird tonight and try and monitor if this fixes the issue, but this will take a few days and I have tried everything (including changing password and turning on 2FA).
I have asked for and am waiting for an email as an attachment, to attempt to inspect headers.
Any advice or guidelines would be sincerely appreciated. Matthew
{Edited to improve readability via line wrap.}
Modified by Matt
Chosen solution
It appears that the issue was not Thunderbird related.
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check you providers web mail outbox/sent. Are they showing there? While IMAP account will eventually syncronise sent folders to the local machine, pop account never do. Some providers like outlook and google place copies of mail sent using their servers (it causes issues on Thunderbird as folk end up with two copies of each mail in their sent folder. SO it is worth checking it there is anything there.
Beyond that you mention invoices. If you are using accounting software, most of those are more than capable of using your SMTP server for your mail account to send mail without reference to a mail client like Thunderbird. It could be your accounting package is sending mail over and over each morning when it is started.
Just to be clear I think you will be wasting your time removing and adding Thunderbird again. About the only thing it could demonstrate is, if the issue still happens after you remove Thunderbird then Thunderbird is in the clear as to being the cause.
What happens with your system every morning. Is it turned on? Awakened from sleep? Do you have an antivirus scanning outgoing mails?
Those things could be causing issues. But my first feeling to look to the source of the invoice emails. Your customers get one every day. Is that one in Thunderbird's sent folder at all or is the invoice email coming from another source entirely.
Hi Matt, thank you for taking the time.
- The emails are also not in my providers online webmail sent folder. I have also gone through all the settings on the webmail and could not find anything applicable. This is from where I changed the password and turned on 2FA. - Accounting software is a great mention, but I did investigate this – the computer that generates the invoice does not have any email linked to it. - In the mornings the computer is awakened from sleep, this is possibly related. But quite difficult to confirm if the times are exactly the same as I do not have access to the emails being sent out, will possibly need to monitor this. There is no antivirus scanning.
I just got the email as an attachment and can now see the headers. I have asked the hosting company to investigate the headers, their previous finding was that they could not find the email on their servers and thus they believe it to be spoofing. But I just confirmed on the email attachment that nothing is changed on the email or invoice, which indicates to me that this is not a third party spoofing attempt.
Chosen Solution
It appears that the issue was not Thunderbird related.