Recovered emails. (Spam)

[Reinardina]

I use several email addresses and have noticed that 'spam suppliers' favour certain addresses for certain things. Only to be expected of course, as I use certain accounts for certain things. They're obviously geared to my browsing habits, even though I am careful not to divulge my address these days.

In some spam folders (I check these regularly), I come across messages, telling me there were 'damaged' emails that have been recovered.
The 'senders' vary from 'Support' to 'Google' and a few other things.

I don't open them of course, but they puzzle me. Do emails ever get mangled?

[anglefire]

No reason why they should - they can get truncated though - so if someone forwards it on and doesn't download the full content (Mobile device for example) then it could get screwed.

[Reinardina]

Yes, I can 'see' that, but 'they' imply (unless I misunderstand), that a provider somehow rescues incomplete emails.
I think they also regularly use the term 'deferred emails,' but I'n not entirely sure about that.

[Hinfrance]

They're all phishing attempts. Chuck them in the trash.

[Reinardina]

They're all phishing attempts. Chuck them in the trash.

They arrive in the trash folder, and are duly thrown out. I was just curious to know if something like a damaged email exists.

[StephenBatey]

I've been using email for over 20 years  - I just checked and one of the oldest emails I could find was from 1997, although I used a different program to my current one in the very early days. In all that time, I've never had a "damaged email".

[Reinardina]

Same here. My internet experience goes back to those days too, and I have never come across emails that needed retrieving.

I'm just wondering, whom they are trying to 'catch' in this way. The grannies, who are all encouraged to use the internet and email to keep in touch, but may not very web savvy?

[StephenBatey]

You don't need a high response rate to turn in a tidy profit. Back in the days when I was involved in the direct mail industry, it was reckoned that 5% was an exceptional response to a campaign - and it was still worthwhile paying out all the fees to make a mail shot. Given that the internet makes it free to send emails, you can make a tidy sum with a negligible response rate - which is how I suspect it works. It's not hard to play on people's fears to buy in some "insurance" against losing data; and even if it's only £20 a time you don't need many to take you up to a reasonable return.

[Reinardina]

The ones I am intrigued by, are not the legitimate mail shots, of which I get very few.

I am constantly surprised by the latest inventions, used to lure me into the cyber criminal's fraudulent web.

This one I received this morning:

FedEx International.  FedEx #12345. My name.  An email containing confidential personal in

This is all I can read without opening it.
Sent from, what is probably, an existing email address, from an infected computer.

This is a new one, I have never had 'FedEx' emails before.

I never open them, so don't know what treats are hidden inside, and they go straight into the spam folder.

(I know I should get a life, and I am working on it. Honestly!)

[StephenBatey]

I seem to be getting a lot of invoices and delivery notes from companies I never dealt with, normally as .zip or .docx files. As I have my own domain name and use different emails for different people, it's easy to spot most frauds straight off. I think I've had a few from "delivery" companies - although I suspect I know what they are really attempting to deliver 

I do still get begging letters asking me to help the writer to claim/access several million dollars in various accounts, which surprises me as I might have expected this type of scam to be extinct now.