This is actually more common than you might think. There are two possibilities: spam and human error.
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Spam or not
What you describe actually sounds a lot like spam: email from people youāve never heard of.
Now Iām going to assume from your question that the email your friend is getting doesnāt look like spam: itās not trying to sell you anything, ask you for money, or get you to click a link. If it doesnāt look like spam itās probably not spam, though emails that donāt look like spam can still sometimes be used as probes to see if an email address might be valid.
Letās assume, for the sake of argument, that itās not spam.
Mistakes or not
What I really think is going on here is that your friend probably has what I call āthe curseā of having a simple email address. The email address consists of a relatively common last name @gmail.com.
My guess is that the senders are intending to email other people with that last name, and just getting it wrong. In fact, it reminds me of years ago when we had a phone number that was one digit off from our local poison control line. People would call us thinking that they were reaching Poison Control.1 That same kind of thing can happen with email.
Typing it incorrectly is just one possibility. Making assumptions is another.
A lot of people will assume that, for example, if someoneās name is John Smith, his email address is probably johnsmith@ the email service. But people make mistakes.
My Gmail address actually isnāt really all that common, and yet I still get occasional email that is clearly targeted at someone else.
Reply or not
Of course, thereās a temptation to reply to correct peopleās errors.
Maybe Iām too cynical, but I actually donāt recommend that. You really donāt have any idea who you are talking to and ultimately, as I said, you could be giving spammers more ammunition. If the person at the other end of the email is really a spammer, your response says to them āYou know what, this email address I sent email to, itās real. Thereās a real person reading it so letās send it some more spam.ā
Another possibility ā much greater, in my opinion ā is that someone has forwarded an email to a lot of folks and didnāt delete the email addresses of folks who had been āin the chainā before them and/or failed to use āBCC.ā This is one of my biggest pet peeves. I sometimes get emails with three or more groups of previous recipients and most of the time I know none of them. This is a gold mine for spammers and folks do their friends no favors by not deleting the prior addresses before forwarding.
Hi,Leo
Every day I found some emails and messages which come from a people I donāt know even I contacted before,most of that emails comes from ladies whose invite me to visit their sites such as sex sites,then I prefer to unsubscribe but unfortunately we have not any contact before but the only one way is to delete I surprise where they found my email so I suspected them that they are spam or hacker.Leo if I ask you a question how I can stop these emails I donāt know?
This is just spam. You cannot stop it and you should NEVER click on āunsubscribeā from spam ā that just confirms that youāre a real person and youāll get MORE spam. Mark the messages as spam in your email program and move on.
Hi ,
If it`s just spam then why is it hard to reply back to them, and why is it of a personal tone ? Spam always has some kind of link in them . These have nothing ! I`ve gotten multiple subjects . I went into their sent from box , and saw they all have at least 5 different Email address and only one will hit ! It`s bazar to say the least and just a we bit unsettling when a few of them have my real name .
They donāt WANT you to reply to them. Thatās why they use fake addresses. Itās typically all about the information in the message. Some spam has specific email addresses in the message body, some have phone numbers, others have links. Others are just probes to see if the email even gets delivered and may have nothing at all. Thereās no use in trying to make sense of spam. Seriously. Mark it as spam, and move on with your life. :-)
Hi Iām having the same problem they keep asking if Iām around certain areas and would I like to meet my girlfriend thinks Iām inviting these emails and maybe meeting girls for sex itās ruining our relationship I donāt know how they got my email address and I canāt stop it thereās never a link or return address I donāt understand could it be from visiting porn sites ? Which Iāll admit I have on occasions please help me to understand???
Show her this article. Does Getting Porn Spam Mean Youāve Been Surfing Porn Sites?. Almost everybody gets that kind of spam and is in no way connected with secret affairs or visiting porn or other questionable websites.
Funny thing, seconds after typing this comment, I saw a new comment on the page I linked to from a woman who said her mind was put at rest after reading that article.
One of my email addresses is my first and last name separated by a ādotā, @gmail.com. I sometimes get email addressed to someone in another part of the country who has the same name, but with no ādotā in the middle. On these emails there is sometimes a āthis email was sent toā, which clearly shows that it was sent to an address that is NOT mine (it lacks the ādotā), but I still get it. I think this is a failure at gmail, who canāt seem to recognize the presence or absence of the dot. I have advised gmailās help system of this issue, but they have never responded or resolved the issue. I feel bad for the other fellowās mssing some of his emails, and wonder if some of mine may be going to HIM. Suggestions?
Actually thatās a feature of gmail. The dot is explicitly ignored (itās in the gmail documentation somewhere). TO be clear there is one and only one account, it is yours, no matter where the dot appears. Others who are sending to that are mistyping an email address. I get it too.
Hi Leo, my husband has been getting these emails that only appear in the spam folder. The one I saw yesterday was one that said Samantha G sent you a message. It had a picture of an attractive woman on it and a link to click on so I can view the message. But when I did it sent me straight to google. Then at the bottom it said this message was sent automatically because you have a message pending on our system. The company was Mega Dating LLC. But when I looked it up, it doesnāt exist!! My question is, was that some form of spam?
Yes this is spam. Thatās why itās in the spam folder. Be very careful about clicking links in emails like that. Or I should say more stronglyā¦ donāt click on them!!!
In fact, I would recommend that you do a thorough malware scan at this point. Hereās an article which may be useful: http://ask-leo.com/when_do_i_actually_need_to_run_a_virus_scan.html
Without a doubt. it is meaningless and should be ignored.
Iām finding emails that go in both my spam and inbox folders. They are women who are from another county wanting to be in a relationship and send pictures. They write a long drawn out email explaining everything in detail. Thereās no link in the email (yet). From what Iāve been researching. It is spam, just doesnāt show until later after they take your money and time. Have you heard of this being spam before?
I had an email from someone I didnāt know and it was marked as spam. I unfortunately opened it and it was really nasty. Telling me to F off and never speak to them again, theyāll never forgive me etc but they compounded it with āyou donāt want to see the bad side of me, just ask your goddamn sisterā I recently lost my sister, so you can imagine this upset me. I ended up replying with āWho are you? My sister is dead!ā Iāve not heard anything back. I know my sister and I have never done anything bad. Is this spam? Why would anyone do this? Itās really upset me.
Replying to that kind of email can be very risky. The response verifies to the sender that your email is a valid address and can open you up to more spam. Is this spam:? That question is answered in the article. Why would anyone do that? Same as the answer to the question Why are people bad?