Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations biv343 on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

Email address being used by unauthorized person

Status
Not open for further replies.

Diblik

IS-IT--Management
Jan 30, 2001
25
US
How can someone send email and make it look like it came from my email address? Better yet, how do I prevent this? (We are behind a firewall, relaying is not allowed, OS is NT4&2000) A person in my company received an email where my email address was the From address. The email was not even addressed to him specifically but had a made up address within our domain. This is from someone outside of our company. Are there any good resources to learn more about tracking and blocking unsolicited email?? TIA for all suggestions.
 
It's easy to forge a sender's email address. Remember, your "send as" or "from" settings are completely arbitrary. This is how the Klez virus operates.

And the real pisser? There isn't a damned thing you can do about it.


If you want to try to track him down, you need to examine the raw SMTP headers on the message. They will tell you how the message got to its recipient. Now keep in mind, if the guy is even moderatly careful, he can forge those headers, too.

Look at the raw data sent your mail client downloaded from the server. You'll see a bunch of headers beginning with "Received: from...". But backtracking that trail, you might at least be able to figure out his ISP from his IP address ( is where you do that). Then, if you want to try to turn up the heat, contact his sysadmin. ______________________________________________________________________
Perfection in engineering does not happen when there is nothing more to add.
Rather it happens when there is nothing more to take away.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top