Since then, he says, he has received a pile of messages intended for people at the telemarketing association. E-mail pirates don't even need to know software code. Then all it takes is a sender who mistakenly types the look-alike address, and the message gets snagged. This trickery is so new that it isn't yet clear whether it can be stopped. Nor is it easy to avoid getting tripped up.
Lawyers are e-mailing memos to the very people they are writing about.
Voters are sending offers of money to their candidate's foe. Companies are losing customers, and perhaps even more. The technique is so seamless that computer experts assume that some firms use hijacked e-mail to snoop on competitors. Not all misdirected e-mail is being pirated. The proliferation of Web sites has made innocent confusion commonplace.