"This email isn't addressed to me, but I got it anyway."

There are a few possible causes for this. First of all, take a look at the type of email that you got. Is it:

• An email that looks like a reply: Something that looks like, "Glad to hear from you, Joe...."

• A commercial email: "Get Rich Fast! Make beautiful women love you!"

• An email from someone you know, writing to someone else you know: Such as a legal document, etc.

If the email looks like a reply, chances are that the sender was responding to someone who had their reply-to address messed up. For example, we had an incident in support where one user--we'll call him samjones for anonymity's sake--had his reply-to address mistyped as samuel, which just happened to be the email address of another BauerCom.Net user.

Then he wrote email to somebody, who didn't pay attention to the reply-to address, and sent off the reply. The mail ended up in samuel's mailbox, and samuel was confused: "What is this mail?"

What to do: When this happens, there's only one thing to do: be a good citizen and write back to the person who sent you that mail. Ask that person to tell his friend to reconfigure his reply-to address. You've done your job as a good Samaritan.

If the email is a commercial email--"Direct Marketing is where it's at!" "Get Rich Quick!" "Lose 45 pounds in 3.2 seconds!"--then you're the lucky recipient of SPAM. Find out more information on this at: http://members.bauercom.net/spam.htm.

What to do: You can either delete the spam, or forward it on to the admins at the originating domain (the part after the @ sign in the originating email address).

If it's from someone you know, the email was most likely sent as a BCC, which is short for Blind Carbon Copy. This means that the person who sent it wanted you to see that they were sending it to the other recipient, but didn't want the other recipient to know that they were BCC:'ing it to you. Kind of cloak-and-daggerish, but sometimes necessary for legal reasons.