Some of us may have been following the whole ‘OzCar’ affair amongst our Federal politicians. (see Turnbull denies passing on fake email) . Me – I couldn't care less but I did find it interesting how technology particularly emails and their authenticity entered into the accusations.
At our recent meeting Ross mentioned it made him curious about how the email header worked in his email program and whether he could change it – and he could.
Most desktop email programs – such as Thunderbird, Outlook, Outlook Express or the updated version called Windows Mail or Windows Live mail - will allow you to specify to specify a ‘From’ address with some even doing so on a per email basis. The details you write in the From address don’t have to be the actual address you are using, that is they don’t have to correspond with the address that your Internet Provider or email provider (if you use a Yahoo, Gmail or other address) has given you. This sort of spoofing of addresses is an old way of sending spam which of course looks to come from someone other than the real spammer
The secret is not in the sender but in the receiver because all of the details of the email are contained within the ‘Header’ of most any email message and it isn’t hard to see them if they aren’t shown by default.
Below is an excerpt from an article at MakeUseOf.com that discusses the information contained in every email and the ways in which you can find it for yourself.
How To Trace Your Emails Back To The Source
Most people won’t notice this, but emails actually arrive in your inbox with a ‘receipt’, which contains a lot of information about the sender. In order to find the sender’s identity, we only need to retrieve an IP address, but inside the email header we can also find the originating domain, reply-to address and sometimes even the email client, for example Thunderbird.
Why would you want to find out the identity of the sender? Well, you may have heard of shady email scams or emails supposedly from Paypal inviting you to re-enter your personal information. Now, you can determine if an email is truly from the authentic source.
Accessing the email header is different for every email provider or email application, and sometimes, it is even hidden. In most of the cases however, the option to reveal the full header will be somewhere in the area where the subject and sender name are provided.
So read the article and next time you get a suspicious looking email you can check it out. You never know – it might be from Ross! :)
