
Ask HN: Any one getting other people's emails in Gmail - x0054
For about a year now I have been receiving other people&#x27;s emails in my Google Apps email account. These are not spam emails, or misaddressed emails, these are emails that are clearly addressed to other people with completely different email addresses. It appears that the intended recipient also gets a copy of each email as sometimes I see back and forth conversations. I always delete these, and the volume is about 1 email per week or so. But what worries me a lot is, if I am getting other people&#x27;s emails, what if other people, perhaps evil people, are getting my personal emails as well?<p>I contacted Google about it several times and got no response. This sounds like the sort of thing they really should look into, but I don&#x27;t now how to reach anyone there. Anyway, I was wondering, has this ever happened to anyone else?
======
S4M
Yeah I do get other people's email, but it seems to be more the sender's
mistake than gmail's. My email is samuel.le@gmail.com, and people seemed to
have been wanting to reach Samuelle <something> (Samuelle is a first name),
Samuel Le <Something>, Samuel <something> Lee, etc. So far I've received an
email from a sales person in a bank in Hong Kong offering me to buy some
commodities derivatives, a non profit organization that takes care of mentally
handicapped persons, a mover in the US, someone else flight ticket
confirmation, some stuff written in Hebrew by a Rabbi, and many more...

When the mail seems legit I reply to the sender explaining they sent it to the
wrong person, and often they apologize. It happens roughly every month/two
months so it's not a major annoyance and so far I haven't received anything
super confidential or personal.

~~~
patatino
"Gmail doesn't recognize dots as characters within usernames, you can add or
remove the dots from a Gmail address without changing the actual destination
address [1]"

Your email adress is samuelle@gmail.com and not samuel.le@gmail.com

[1]
[https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10313?hl=en](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10313?hl=en)

~~~
S4M
Yes, the dot is completely optional, and I think it's one reason I got emails
for other people. Senders wants to email to samuelle.something@gmail.com,
somehow mistake it to samuelle@gmail.com and I end up being the recipient.

------
mike-cardwell
There is not really any connection between what is in the From/To/Cc headers
of an email and where the email was actually sent from or to. For example, I
just sent an email to my own GMail account and put "foo@example.com" in both
the From and To headers. Here is a slighly obfuscated log of how I did it:

    
    
      mike@flan:~$ telnet gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com 25
      Trying 2a00:1450:400c:c01::1a...
      Trying 74.125.71.26...
      Connected to gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
      Escape character is '^]'.
      220 mx.google.com ESMTP s83si999899wmf.10 - gsmtp
      EHLO whatever
      250-mx.google.com at your service, [*.*.*.*]
      250-SIZE 157286400
      250-8BITMIME
      250-STARTTLS
      250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
      250-PIPELINING
      250-CHUNKING
      250 SMTPUTF8
      MAIL FROM:<foo@example.com>
      250 2.1.0 OK s83si999899wmf.10 - gsmtp
      RCPT TO:<*****@googlemail.com>
      250 2.1.5 OK s83si999899wmf.10 - gsmtp
      DATA
      354  Go ahead s83si999899wmf.10 - gsmtp
      From: <foo@example.com>
      To: <foo@example.com>
      Subject: Hello World
    
      Hello
      .
      250 2.0.0 OK 1467538374 s83si999899wmf.10 - gsmtp
      QUIT
      221 2.0.0 closing connection s83si999899wmf.10 - gsmtp
      Connection closed by foreign host.
    

Google even accepted that email and delivered it. Even after Google forwarded
it on to my non-Google email address, it still had "foo@example.com" in both
the From and To headers. It does not have my GMail address in there at all.

I'm surprised google accepted that email actually. Seeing as it outright hard-
failed SPF checks. example.com makes a pretty clear statement in their SPF
record that it should never ever be used to send email ("v=spf1 -all")

~~~
x0054
While what you say is totally true, but none of these emails are fishing
emails, spam, or anything like that. It's just normal people emailing each
other about home repairs, dinner, etc. The latest one was a LinkedIn password
reset email, a real one, not a fake one. It was sent to an email address that
looks nothing like mine.

~~~
mike-cardwell
Would you be able to provide the full raw headers for one of these emails?

------
tedmiston
Yes, I get this a lot as well.

My email is <first initial><last name>@... and another, actually multiple
people, with the same first initial and last name, but different first name
appear to be confused.

I receive real estate related emails for one person and credit card statements
for another. I have attempted to report this to the CC company, but they
require me to log in (to this user's account which I don't own with a company
I don't have my own CC with) in order to create a ticket. It's been going on
for over a year but I've been unable to get them to stop sending them to me. I
guess they never considered this use case.

In first-time cases I often reply when it involves a third party to kindly let
them know. I also filter aggressively.

That said, it seems too obvious a person could not know their own email
address these days. Sometimes I wonder if these are stealthily designed target
attacks of social engineering. One reason I never click the links.

------
NetStrikeForce
I do have several people around the world giving out my email address as
theirs. I get all sorts of weird email.

~~~
mod
I also have this happening to me.

I get texas dmv emails and sometimes signup emails from websites.

~~~
xuki
Especially if you have a short handle like firstname@gmail.com.

------
superobserver
Yes.

This is one of the reasons why I wish Google implemented aliases for accounts
anchored to a UID instead of requiring a persistent user account name. This is
how Microsoft does it, actually. Then there might be a way to control for
accounts that have similar names.

------
mindaslab
Once I created a private google doc containing my business idea, I saw that
very same text when I searched for my business name.

Thankfully Google showed only the first few lines in its general search. There
is some data leak in Google. Its so big, something like this can happen.

------
rstormsf
Are you CC'ed or BCC'ed to it?

~~~
mirimir
Very likely.

> ... Gmail strips the BCC recipient(s) from messages. The message is sent to
> the BCC recipient, but the BCC recipient is not displayed in the saved sent
> message. (The BCC recipient is also not displayed on Gmail's web-based
> interface if the message originated in Thunderbird.)

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-and-
gmail](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-and-gmail)

~~~
x0054
This could be the case, but I do not know any of these people, their names and
emails are nothing like mine, and all of these emails are not spam, just
people talking to each other about home repairs or the latest one was a
LinkedIn Password reset email.

------
bmh_ca
Does your email have a dot in it? Gmail has a bug, if I recall correctly,
where people would get email from addresses with the dot stripped (eg
a.b@gmail.com would get email from ab@gmail.com)

I myself regularly receive email that appears to be a result of this bug.

I have never seen a fix.

~~~
mshook
It's not a bug, it's a feature. This way people won't fake being you by
creating an account with a dot in the user part of the email address (at least
that's the way I see it eventhough I've never seen an official reason)...

[https://gmail.googleblog.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-
mo...](https://gmail.googleblog.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-more-from-
your.html)

~~~
bmh_ca
Fascinating. Except I created Gmail accounts with '.' in them and now get
email intended for the Gmail accounts that do not.

Interesting reference, thanks. I'm guessing my account was created before
intended restrictions came into play.

