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Why do I get bounced emails that I didn’t send?

You probably receive these bounced messages because spammers and/or viruses make use of your email address to send out spam or malware.
The SMTP protocol make communication between different mail servers possible. Your mail client too sends emails using this SMTP protocol, to communicate with e.g. our mailserver or your provider’s mail server. Unfortunately, this protocol lacks any protections against fake email addresses. Anyone can easily change the ‘From’ header in an e-mail.

Spammers operate this way. They use your email address to send emails. When these spam messages get rejected or bounced by the recipient, you will receive the error message, because the mailserver thinks you sent the email.

This is a global problem and can’t be solved. There are few techniques that could be implemented, but for it to be effective, every mailserver connected to the internet has to do so. We can only advise you to ignore these messages and remove them.

Updated on 25 June 2020

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