Internet and e-mail policy and practice
including Notes on Internet E-mail


2004
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Home :: Email

13 Jun 2004

E-mail address forgery Email

In my roles as postmaster at CAUCE (the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail) and abuse.net, I get a lot of baffled and outraged mail from people who have discovered that someone is sending out spam, often pornographic spam, with their return address on the From: line. ``How can they do that? How do I make them stop?'' The short answers are ``easily'' and ``it's nearly impossible.''

One way that e-mail is very similar to paper mail is that you can scribble any return address you want on an envelope and mail it. With paper mail, just like e-mail, you can imagine ways to make it more difficult to scribble the name of someone you don't like, but the costs of doing so would be huge, and the benefits dubious. ...

... read the mini-paper on-line
... mini-paper printable version


posted at: 01:15 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/forge.trackback


Topics


My other sites

Who is this guy?

Airline ticket info

Taughannock Networks

Other blogs

Spam resource
(Al Iverson)

The Spam Diaries
(Ed Falk)

Word to the Wise
(Laura Atkins)

Related sites

IRTF Anti-Spam Research Group

Network Abuse Clearinghouse

Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail



© 2005-2008 John R. Levine.
CAN SPAM address harvesting notice: the operator of this website will not give, sell, or otherwise transfer addresses maintained by this website to any other party for the purposes of initiating, or enabling others to initiate, electronic mail messages.