Mail delivered to incorrect recipient

HCL Domino Domino Forum
1

Mail is being routed to a recipient but the To filed shows what must be a spoofed address.EG. Joe Bloggs has a mail in his inbox that was sent to mary.smith@uk.company.com

Whilst I appreciate its spam, I have to explain how it happened and I have no idea.

Is the “To:” address modified after delivery ?

Can somebody please explain this ?

Thanks

2

Subject: Mail delivered to incorrect recipient

You can change a setting so the actual recipient name does show in the bcc field. Look up “Setting advanced inbound MIME options” in Administrator Help and check out the information under “If each recipient’s address does not appear in any address header, then add their address to the BCC list”.

3

Subject: Mail delivered to incorrect recipient

This is coming in from the internet, right?If it is, then your user’s address was in the bcc field. And you can’t see the bcc field on messages arriving from the internet (not even in the document properties).

This has happened to us, and it’s very hard for the users to swallow sometimes, but this was the explanation we got from Lotus.

4

Subject: Mail delivered to incorrect recipient

See also Rellim T’s reply.

The reason that the “To” field does not necessarily hold the address of the recipient is that both sender and recipient information held in message headers have nothing at all to to with message routing and delivery.

Message routing and delivery is controled by “envelopes” which are volatile and exist only while a message is being routed. This concept applies equally to SMTP and to native Notes mail.

It is necessary for a mail system to distinguish between header to/from and envelope recipient/sender because without this distinction it would be impossible to send email to groups, to send bcc or to reflect mail off for example a list server.

You will frequently see this in spam where the “to” field is not the victim of the spam (it is quite often the sender of the spam in the case of 419 mails coming from certain web mail services). But you will also see it in Notes mail itself.

Try sending an email to a group in your PAB. People receiving it will see only the group name in the “to” field, not their own name. But it seems they never pause to contemplate how the router was able to deliver the message given that the message data itself nowhere identifies them explicitly as a recipient.

Hope this makes sense.

Chris Linfoot

5

Subject: Mail delivered to incorrect recipient - any way to control this?

Thank you for the explanations.

We are implementing spam controls, and we are affected by this. We are not sure what do do.

Are there any options to control this from happening?

Thanks,

Ed

6

Subject: RE: Mail delivered to incorrect recipient

Thanks for that guys, makes sense to me now.I am not sure the users will understand but at least I can explain it.

Thanks

Steve