technical question about spam & emails

The Vigilante · Post by **The Vigilante** » Sat Nov 14, 2009 5:44 pm

Like everyone on the internets, I receive spam in my inbox.

This morning though, I received one that catched my attention, because according to my blackberry phone, I had actually sent that email to myself, which I obviously didn't.

Basically it goes like this. The sender's display name on my phone is mine, at this point I don't see any adress, just the sender's name. When I scroll on the sender's name, I see my own email adress. The weird part is that when I check this email with Thunderbird, I can see it as "whatever@whatever.com (Last Name, First Name)", where the email adress is the actual spammer's email, and the Last Name and First Name in parenthesis are mine.

Anyone has any idea what the hell is going on here ??

shadzar · Post by **shadzar** » Sat Nov 14, 2009 5:52 pm

Someone spoofed your phone number or email address.

You need to check the full header to see where it really came from.

Anyone can put in a "from" to show on an email, but it will have the original tracking information in the full header.

I could send an email and put in the "from" box webmaster@tgdmb.com and it would send and show that.

But it would give my real SMTP outgoing mail in the full header.

So nothing really to worry about, unless you don't give out your email to people, then you might need to check with your email provider and tell them you are having your email spoofed.

The Vigilante · Post by **The Vigilante** » Sat Nov 14, 2009 5:55 pm

shadzar wrote:Someone spoofed your phone number or email address.

You need to check the full header to see where it really came from.

Anyone can put in a "from" to show on an email, but it will have the original tracking information in the full header.

I could send an email and put in the "from" box webmaster@tgdmb.com and it would send and show that.

But it would give my real SMTP outgoing mail in the full header.

So nothing really to worry about, unless you don't give out your email to people, then you might need to check with your email provider and tell them you are having your email spoofed.

OK, that clears things up a bit, but what about the part where it shows my name ?

shadzar · Post by **shadzar** » Sat Nov 14, 2009 6:08 pm

Happens to people on Yahoo email all the time.

Someone saw your name and email on some mailing list from something you did online, and are using it.

The SMTP route should be able to track you back to the source to see who it is.

Again if you are really worried, best thing is to report the email to your email provider and tell them someone is spoofing your email address and sending out mass spam to people.

Send then a FULL copy of the email with full headers, and they should be able to track it back and report it to the FBI to look into.

Or whatever the FBI equivalent is where you live, that handles email fraud.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Sat Nov 14, 2009 11:56 pm

I used to hunt down the domains and IPs that were allowing this crap onto the internet...

...But eventually the largest name provider stepped in and said they weren't going to allow lookups and traces anymore, because it interfered with their business of selling names to the spammers.

So I stopped doing it.

-Crissa

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Sun Nov 15, 2009 1:16 am

shadzar wrote:Anyone can put in a "from" to show on an email, but it will have the original tracking information in the full header.

Conversely, I know of someone who screwed up his "From" line. People used to reply to his email and then call him several days later wondering if he ever got the email. (The mistake was in the email server name so I think that is why they didn't get a reject notice.)