Admin: email address spoofing

[Guest guest]

Greetings,

Just a reminder about the difficulty of knowing the true origin of an email ... it can appear to be from me or the American Cancer society etc, but be in fact junk mail, or worse.

How can spoofing of the From address happen so readily?

I think a mailed letter provides a good example. It's quite easy to write your neighbor's address in the return address section on an envelop before dropping into a mailbox. Similarly, people with programming skill can change the FROM address of mail they send to be your address, or mine, or a respected organization's - the more legitimate the email address that's spoofed, the more likely it is to get past Spam filters.

So when you see an email that appears to be from someone you know and trust, but the content or subject of it does not make sense, probably it's spoofing, and the email should be deleted without opening.

All the best,

~ Karl