Look, your email has been Spoofed !!

Few days ago when I wrote an article about ‘Call Spoofing’, I was very happy that I wasn’t a victim of any such activities until I received a Spoofed call later that day. Gosh, what a timing that was.

Today when I came across a similar thing but this time it’s the email which is the medium and termed ‘email spoofing’, again I thought I was safe until I found my email Spoofed. Email Spoofing is similar to call spoofing whose main aim is to hide the actual email address of the sender.

I have complete faith in Gmail (especially because of its 8 wonderful features) and so never mind to look into my Spam Folder but somehow I clicked on that Spam link and then came the surprise. There were a bunch of emails from unknown sources using my email ID as their address.

This in no way means that my account is compromised (as I constantly keep changing my passwords for better security). This may the case where the sender has either Spoofed my email address or used my address as the reply-to address so that all the replies would be delivered to my email ID.

Just login to your Gmail account and click on the Spam folder. You are lucky if you didn’t find email with ‘me’ as the sender. If you’re unlucky just like me, click on one of the message to find your email been Spoofed (Don’t click on any link that the Spoofed email contains in its body). After opening the message from ‘me’ click on Show details and you’ll find that your email ID is used in the ‘from’ part of the email delivery.

Gmail knows whether an email is actually sent by you or whether it’s a Spoofed email. All the email in your Spam folder from ‘me’ are cleverly caught by Gmail and hence sent to Spam.

While I’m not sure how you can Spoof someone’s emails, I can tell you how you can control and stop spammers from sending such emails. Just sent the full headers of the email to spam[at]uce.gov. Visit this page to know how to find the headers of different email applications.