Mail server sends your mail to someone else

Most of us may know about the MTA “message transfer agent” or “mail transfer agent” or in a simple word mail relay, which basically circulate our messages to the recipients. Its job is sending the message to the right addressee.

There is a defined way to complete this task, MUA – SMTP – MTA – MDA – POP / IMAP – MUA. I’ll not go in further technical details here, still I want to understand, what are the chances of failure in this process, where the mail doesn’t reach to the actual recipient, instead landing to other’s mail box. At which step, we add another level of check to fix this issue?

Interesting? Believe me it is happening. I am not talking about the mails are not delivering to other mail recipient, I am talking about mails delivering to wrong recipient. Imagine your salary slip, your bank accounts details, travel details, password reset requests are received by other person who is having similar mail id as you do, with an extra dot “.”.

While searching over internet, I have received few mailing issues, however don’t know how will this issue be fixed?

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/Gdb4Ga6hwyY

https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=137222

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/oemail-osend/some-of-my-e-mails-are-not-reaching-the-intended/c9bc0937-79c9-4504-b899-f040962cf479

I think the simplest way to fix it, will be to inform the person about this issue and keep on forwarding these messages to that person who belongs to these messages, but the question is why? Am I responsible to receive others message? Is he responsible for Google mail server, which is delivering his message to me? Or is it Google mail server, which forwards his messages to me?

Someone has to test it, collect the failure rate and fix it and I don’t think I have Google’s mail server’s access yet 🙂