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Why do I get a bounced mail from an unknown correspondent?

This is not a case of someone hacking into your email but rather the unfortunately more common occurrence of externally originating spam which utililises a prior mass harvest of email addresses to forge a valid email username as the envelope sender and its related email address as the "From:" address. 

It does this since it helps protect the spammers own traceability and because the spammers own email account may already be blacklisted generally, whereas spam originating from a reputable institution is more likely to get through security checks.

As the email message is in all other respects a spam message, many institution’s/company’s mail security systems will correctly identify it as spam and block it and either drop the messages completely or, as in this case, write back to the apparent sender (in this case you) to inform that the message was not delivered – even though you weren’t the actual sender of the message.

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