Who Sent That Email

Do you really know Who Sent That Email you are reading? Have you ever received  a joke email message that looked like it came from Your favourite POP star, actor, actress or even the Queen.

If you have then you will know just how easy it is to be fooled with email. The problem with Internet email is that it is basically insecure. You have in fact no way of knowing, under normal circumstances, that the email came from the purported sender.

If you take a look at a standard email client setup procedure it is the responsibility of the person configuring the email client to enter in the :

• Display Name ( name of person who sent it)

• Sender email address ( address of sender)

The person configuring these fields can enter in what he/she wants and so if he wants to send email as Santa Claus he just enters Santa Claus in the Display Name field. (see below)

When the receiver receives the email he sees this:

Phishing attacks/scams are becoming more and more common, and it is not surprising given just how easy it is to pretend to be someone else.

Therefore you should never trust that the Email your have just received actually came from the sender. So never give away any personal  data in response to an email, and always treat links in an email with suspicion and if they are to a private site (bank, paypal etc) never use them.

Putting Trust back into Email

Because of the growth and the obvious danger in spam and phishing there are currently two initiative for putting trust back into email.

They are Sender id (Microsoft) and Domain Keys (Yahoo). They are not widely implemented as yet and I will cover them in later articles.

For personal email use between two business colleagues/friends email signatures have been available for many years and I will cover these in a future article.

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