Gmail message went to A Co-worker

April 12, 2014 11:08 PM

I sent myself an important tax document as an attachment this afternoon, sending it from my corporate gmail account to myself at the same address. No one was cc'd or bccd. an hour later a coworker wrote me and asked: did you mean to send this to me? He had received my message and attachment... I checked my sent messages and found the message i sent to myself but nothing to him and he was not Bcc'd. How could this have happened? His name and mine are not close by the way.
posted by dougiedd to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

Could you have automatic forwarding set up? Did a copy of the message land in your inbox too?
posted by contraption at 11:21 PM on April 12, 2014

Ask your colleague to select "Show Original" while reading the message in Gmail, and get them to send you all the headers in the original (any line from the first--probably "Delivered-To:"--down to a blank line). Your goal is to read the Received: headers in reverse order, starting from the bottom-most. In messages where there's no forgery involved, those headers tell a story about what email servers handled the message and, typically, for whom. That may explain what happened ... or not ... but it's a place to start.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 11:27 PM on April 12, 2014 [6 favorites]

Could this have something to do with a shared Google Drive? I ask because lately when dealing with downloads, uploads and attachments, I've had problems with some things being automagically uploaded to Google Drive when that was definitely not my intention... and in fact one item was a tax document. I sort of freaked out before deleting with all due panic: "wait, what!? why is that there!? who else has access to this drive!? how did it get there!? WHYYYY? aaargh!"
posted by taz at 12:17 AM on April 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

As Monsieur Caution advises, you need to look at the headers to find out what actually happened. Just about every mail client out there routinely hides most e-mail headers from you but there's nothing else that you have access to that is nearly as useful for figuring out what actually happened.

As you might imagine, start with the "To:" header and check who the recipient was supposed to be. If the To: header indicates that it was in fact addressed to your co-worker, I'd guess what happened was an unhelpful auto-complete when you were trying to address the message.
posted by Nerd of the North at 12:58 AM on April 13, 2014

Get them to forward the whole thing back to you then you can study the headers. My guess is an unintended autocomplete recipient, or a group instead of an individual or perhaps a rule CCing this person. Another possibility is they were sent it by the intended recipient.
posted by epo at 2:43 AM on April 13, 2014

Best answer: Check your gmail filters. Possibly you set up a filter for some past project using a particular keyword to forward to your coworker, and possibly others, and this message happened to trigger that keyword.
posted by beagle at 6:38 AM on April 13, 2014

Please be sure to get back to us to tell us what happened when you figure it out, or if you don't.
posted by yclipse at 7:04 AM on April 13, 2014 [6 favorites]

Take a close look at the settings under:

Gear -> Settings -> Accounts and Import
Gear -> Settings -> Forwarding and POP/IMAP
Gear -> Settings -> Filters

Ensure you're neither granting access nor automatically forwarding.
posted by samsara at 7:24 AM on April 13, 2014

I would look at your gmail contacts that get auto-created (click the arrow next to 'mail' in the top left and select contacts.). See if there was some auto association of your name to his email address somehow.

I'm assuming you didn't get the document as well as your coworker.
posted by Jacob G at 12:54 PM on April 13, 2014

Response by poster: to header shows it was addressed to me.
I received it as did he.
posted by dougiedd at 3:05 PM on April 13, 2014

Response by poster: It does appear that this coworker was on a filter for another project that this message somehow did trigger, though it did not seem to meet the trigger for that.i will be cautious in this sorts of forward filters from now on!

Thanks
posted by dougiedd at 3:07 PM on April 13, 2014