Receipt of compromised e-mails
Over the past year or so I have received several spurious e-mails apparently originating from people I know. However, on closer inspection, although the first part of the e-mail address is familiar, including the nickname, the part after the @ symbol has been changed, i.e. it appears to come from another ISP. The e-mail usually comprises nothing save, "Hi," followed by my e-mail address, and then a link to an unfamiliar URL which I have, of course, never opened. One or two of the purported senders have admitted to having been hacked but the last one vehemently denies that it is anything to do with his computer. Nevertheless, I feel it highly likely that his contacts list has been compromised. In three of the past cases, the original, valid, e-mail address appears in my contact list but in the previous case, although my e-mail address appears in the sender's contact list, it does not, nor has it ever been, featured in mine. Where is the problem? I am running Thunderbird 45.2.0 under Linux Mint Maya.
All Replies (2)
'Are you serious here? SPAM compromises something like 80% of email traffic. Folk continually upload their contacts to sites like Facebook and then allow other sites access to their contacts as a part of the sign in process.
Your email address is probably held is 5000 different commercial mailing lists.
Where one spam mail comes from is largely a waste of your time. It is common practice with spammers to send a mail to say bruce @somedomain.com. and bcc thousands of other bruce emails to that email.
Matt, Whilst I am grateful for your reply, could I suggest that my question was not quite so dumb as it appears to have been perceived. I am well aware that my e-mail address is available to literally thousands of people to whom I would prefer that it not be. Hence the dozens of e-mails that land in my inbox every day offering me huge sums of money from people I do not know, or trying to persuade me to open spurious links. They all go straight into the trash can. I have no doubt that the genuine sender of the e-mail I mentioned has the same problem. I can also readily see how knowledge of my e-mail address, and his, can be used to disseminate bogus e-mails. What I cannot understand, however, is how a spammer was able to make the connection between his e-mail address and mine. The likelihood of doing so by chance is virtually zero. There appear to be three possibilities. (1) My Thunderbird address book has been compromised in some way. (2) The sender's address book has been compromised. (3) The sender copied his e-mail to an unreliable third party or made the information available in some other way. There is no evidence of this. I do not use social media. I have no accounts. What I am trying to establish is whether my Thunderbird account, which I thought to be reasonable secure, has been penetrated in some way, which leaves me with a problem, or whether the source of the fraudulent e-mail lies elsewhere, in which case it is someone else's problem.