How can someone send an email to others, yet in the To: my email appears but I never received the email?

How can someone send an email to others, yet in the To: my email appears but I never received the email this cause many problems. Because the person who sent the email purposely, claim she sent it to me, and the best part is that my email address was correctly typed in to the To section. I have been told it is possible, is there someway I can prove this is what happened?

Asked by ArtN 52 months ago Similar questions: send email appears received Computers > Hardware > Desktops & Laptops.

Similar questions: send email appears received.

Emails aren’t a guaranteed way of communicating. There are many reasons why an email can actually be sent to a person, but the recipient never receive it. It could have been blocked by the sender’s server for some unknown reason (flagged as potential spam, too large a filesize, etc. ), or blocked by the recipient’s email server for the very same URL1 may have originated from an IP address that is on a server list as being known for sending spam and malicious content.

If a sender uses certain software like Microsoft Outlook, they can designate all emails be sent with a confirmation request so the recipient must check whether they want to say they’ve received the email or not. But even that isn’t foolproof because the recipient can check that they do not want the sender notified of their receipt. If an email was forwarded to someone with your email address and others listed in the body of the email, and the person is untrustworthy, all they’d have to do is type your email address into the body, or forwarded part, of the forwarded email.

For example (edited part in bold): Here’s the email I sent earlier: From: maliciousemployeeemail.com Sent: 9/4/07, 8:45 am CST To: blahblahblahemail. Com, youremailemail.Com, Mr.Bossemail.com...etc. Subject: emails not being answered on time Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah I’m trying to get you in trouble, blah blah blah blah. See how easy that is to fake?

All a person has to do is type your email address into the body and it looks like they actually sent you an email when they may not have, and it will even show an old time stamp. The only way to really know if an email was sent is possibly to contact the ITS division and ask them to go back over all emails sent from the person you suspect did this. They are required by law to have a backup of emails these days for protection.

Sources: My personal experience .

Use a telnet program to prove your point. Disclaimer: the following comment is only for educational purpose. I'm not responsible for your actions.

What you are describing is a trick that take advantage of the way SMTP protocol (email) works. In a typical SMTP conversation, it looks something like this (S=Mail Client; R=Mail Server): S: MAIL FROM: R: 250 ok S: RCPT TO: R: 250 ok S: DATA R: 354 send the mail data, end with . S: Date: 23 Oct 81 11:22:33 S: From: ME@SOMEWHERE.

DOM S: To: YOU@YOU. DOM S: Subject: You will never receive this email S: S: Even though the "To:" field has your name on it, you will S: never receive this email because you are NOT in the S: "RCPT TO:" field. S: .

R: 250 ok The way that it works is that mail server only deliver messages to recipients listed in the "RCPT TO:" field. The "TO:" field you normally see does NOT mean anything to the mail server, yet all mail clients display this field as if this is the true recipient. In the above case, only SOMEONE@ELSEWHERE.

DOM will receive the email. YOU@YOU. DOM will not receive anything.

You can easily create a fake message using a decent telnet program (one that you can specify a different port). If you have Windows XP, start Command Prompt, the type "telnet 25" (replace with the SMTP server you want to test on. ) Now you can enter commands similar to the example above and create a fake email message.

Sources: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0821.txt .

The "to" line can be faked The SMTP protocol used to deliver mail is very funny. ("Funny" as in "bad", actually. ) It doesn't actually pull the delivery address from the "to" line of the message.

That "to" line, along with just about everything else, is purely random text. The actual delivery addresses are given as a separate part of the protocol and not included in the email. It's exactly the same way spammers fake the return addresses of their mail: the "from" line is isn't tested.(I see fake "to" lines in spam all the time, as well.

) So it's very easy for somebody to fake the "to" line in a message, apparently including you to the other recipients but not really actually doing so. Proving that an email was sent is actually fairly tricky.It would take a lot of work to explain that in a court, actually, and I don't know how successful I'd be, but I would not take the "to" line as proof as an email was sent to you.

I sent an email to myself, once received I then hit the forward button and could change all the info in the email. I was able to change the original TO and FROM in the body of the email I had previously sent to myself and once I forwarded it to another person they could not tell that I had originally initiated the email. I tried this just to see if it could be done because the example from ArtN happened to someone I know and I wanted to see if I could duplicate the process..

Not really Unless you can get an in-transit copy of the email or a forwarded copy from another recipient you trust (it is possible for them to edit it before forwarding to you), there isn't any good way. It's very possible for email to reach some recipients and not others. If other recipients are on the same mail server as you (and received it), the odds of it disappearing in transit drop drastically.

There are always (uncommon) cases of mail servers improperly handling mail when another mail server goes down or when a mail server just has a hiccup. Sources: Experience .

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.