Why do I get someone else's email?

We have the same first and last names, but her account is at tds.net and mine is Gmail. I don't get all of her email, just occasional dinner plans sent to a group and something from Martha Stewart.

But yesterday her husband sent her the information for accessing their NWA WorldPerks account. Both account numbers and pin, and of course I already knew the last name. The email was sent to [email protected] and arrived in my inbox at [email protected]. I checked it out and neither of them has enough miles to bother stealing, so I advised him to have his wife get a new email address.

And several days ago I got 4 of these messages in my Gmail inbox (I subbed my.name for my name):

from TDSNET Ping Test <[email protected]>
to [email protected]
date Sun, Apr 5, 2009 at 1:36 PM
subject Test #4

Any idea what's going on? I can't forward her email to her because it just comes back to me, so I sent it to her husband.

Those test messages you received are the clue... There's a DNS router table screwed up somewhere. Looks like TDS is aware, which is why they sent the pings. If you're lucky, since TDS never received the ping messages (you got them instead) the problem will get fixed shortly.

First of all check the complete header of the emails you receive. Especially the Received information which shows from from which and via which servers the email traveled to your account.

A possible reason that you get this mails is a wrong DNS or MX record in one server.

There's a TXT record referring to googlemail.com in the tds.net DNS records. I don't know enough to know what it means. The MX records are set to tds.net

tds.net IN TXT v=spf1 ip4:216.170.230.0/24 ip4:204.246.1.0/24 ip4:152.144.128.0/24 ip4:63.240.89.0/24 include:aspmx.googlemail.com ~all
http://centralops.net/co/DomainDossi...net_whois=true

This just means that the google hosted servers are permitted to send mail as a tds.net user in the SPF anti-spam framework. It has nothing to do with inbound mail.

I agree that the headers need to be examined in more detail to truly understand what is going on. The tds.net mail server is online and appears to be functioning normally, and the DNS entries appear to be OK.

The header details of that ping test email would probably be sufficient to figure it out. If you choose the "view original" option in the more menu and sub out your name and share it maybe we can help more.

I notice that www.tds.net is "powered by Google" so that may have something to do with it. I'd suggest just contacting the tds.net folks and let them know what's happening:

https://www.tdstelecom.com/about/contactus.aspx?st=1
for the contact page, or
1-866-571-6662

Cheers.

FWIW, what you just admitted to doing there is a felony in some states.

This is apparently the case. The husband emailed me that tds.net is looking into it, and that they did recently change over to Google.

I'm pretty happy the woman apparently only gets 1 or 2 emails a month.

Riverwalk, for the record I didn't really do that. Mostly because I have no interest in NWA miles.

Thanks everyone. I think this will be solved soon.