Recently I have been receiving a lot of unwanted (spam) email messages. These messages are not just unwanted, but they are also not addressed to my email address! Looking in the “To” field on the email message these are addressed to other people, but I am still receiving the messages. Is there any way that I can stop or divert these email messages? The computer is running Windows XP Home Edition and AVG Antivirus Free 8.0.

These emails are actually being addressed to you, but you cannot see your email address in the message header. You mentioned that the message is addressed to a different person in the “To” field. This is the primary addressee of the email message. However, your email address would have been included in the “BCC” field of the email message. BCC stands for Blind Carbon Copy which allows the sender to address the email to additional people, but any email addresses placed into the BCC field are not visible to the recipients of the email message (thus the term blind carbon copy – it copies the message onto additional people, blindly). An example is best in this situation. Say that I address an email in the “To” field to silicon.kid@isp.com. In the BCC field I then enter the additional email address frank@isp.com. Both people (silicon.kid and frank) will receive the email message, but we both will only be able to see that the email address was sent to silicon.kid (as his email address is in the To field). I won’t know that the email was sent to frank@isp.com as that email address does not appear in the email header, as it has been removed since the address was placed in the BCC field. Likewise, you only know for certain that the email was sent to silicon.kid (as that is in the To field) and frank (as you received the message). There could be other email addresses in the BCC field of which we are unaware, as we cannot see the contents of that field.

Returning to your specific scenario, the spam email message has been primarily addressed to the person in the “To” field but also BCCed onto other people, including yourself. The selection of the primary addressee of the email message is entirely random, so if you have received other spam messages which have been addressed directly to you then it is likely that other people also received that message but were BCCed onto the message, so you have been unaware that other people also received that spam message.

There is really nothing that you can do to stop these messages from being received, as someone has got hold of your email address and can basically send what they like to the address. You could setup a filter or rule in your email client which deletes (or moves) any emails which are not specifically addressed to you, but I would recommend against this solution since there are many instances where a legitimate message may not be specifically addressed to you (such as if you are subscribed to a mailing list). If you are not receiving a huge volume of such messages then I would suggest that you continue to manually delete the messages. If they do become problematic then you may wish to investigate a spam filtering software package to help detect and remove spam messages or change your email address.

As an aside, the BCC field is very good when sending a group message and you do not wish to expose the email address of all the recipients to everyone who receives the email. When sending a group email it is good practice to put your own email address in the “To” field and then all the recipients in the “BCC” field. This means that you receive a confirmation copy of the message which you sent, but none of the recipients can see the email address of the other recipients. Additionally, this also prevents someone from pressing the Reply All button and sending an email back to all the people who received that message (which you probably do not wish to occur).